tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33001188309516453562018-02-21T09:24:37.300-08:00STORIES Rex Millernoreply@blogger.comBlogger1616125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3300118830951645356.post-66868120797329373592018-02-21T01:28:00.001-08:002018-02-21T01:37:52.616-08:00The Future Of Science <img alt="Image result for bertrand russell" height="120" src="https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcT3VVO1keeS3x-vsWXbuj61ChLXftO4Y6y8AsepaawjKa7dhqDD" width="200" /><br /><br />(Originally posted&nbsp;July 31, 2016)<br /><br />1.<br /><br />- Tell me what you think:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><i>Men sometimes speak as though the progress of science must necessarily be a boon to mankind, but that, I fear, is one of the comfortable nineteenth-century delusions which our more disillusioned age must discard. Science enables the holders of power to realize their purposes more fully than they could otherwise do. If their purposes are good, this is a gain; if they are evil, it is a loss. In the present age, it seems that the purposes of the holders of power are in the main evil, in the sense that they involve a diminution, in the world at large, of the things men are agreed in thinking good. Therefore, at present, science does harm by increasing the power of rulers. Science is no substitute for virtue; the heart is as necessary for a good life as the head.</i></blockquote><div>&nbsp;And:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><i>Science has not given men more self-control, more kindliness, or more power of discounting their passions in deciding upon a course of action. It has given communities more power to indulge their collective passions, but, by making society more organic, it has diminished the part played by private passions. Men's collective passions are mainly evil; far the strongest of them are hatred and rivalry directed towards other groups. Therefore at present all that gives men power to indulge their collective passions is bad. That is why science threatens to cause the destruction of our civilization.</i></blockquote>The quotes are from Bertrand Russell's 1924 book,&nbsp;<a href="http://rextyranny.blogspot.com/2016/07/icarus-or-future-of-science-by-bertrand.html"><i>Icarus Or The Future Of Science</i>.</a><br /><div>- Russell thought if we could get to a communism that respected the heart, getting there by the way of worldwide democracy, we'd be safe, but clearly there was a problem.&nbsp;</div><div>- We might destroy ourselves first.</div><div>- Yes. Russell accepted the reality of both mystical experience and the world of science, allowing them each their separate worlds. Perhaps if he'd tried to reconcile religious experience with the world of science he'd have come up with an answer.</div><div>- Can religious experience advise us on how to use our technology? Can technology be applied to religious experience?</div><div>- Yes, both. We've talked about this.&nbsp;</div><div>- We've talked about so many things.</div><div>- The problem Russell raises is keeping our communities from killing us while we allow our better natures learn to remake and advance those communities. Being able to see the warning signs that our communities are about to crush our attempts at understanding might, if not solve the problem in itself, at least be a step in the right direction.</div><div>- It might.</div><div>- The worst, most dangerous form of government is not dictatorship, which can be benevolent, but totalitarianism. Totalitarianism has many varieties, some atheist, some religious, some socialist, some capitalist; generally totalitarianisms have in common advocacy of violence, hatred of strangers, and claim to total control of society. Do you recognize these three elements?</div><div>- You mean how they fit together?</div><div>- Yes.</div><div>- There is always the old fall-back to explain human stupidity: we get together to enact the story of an old god, representing our present world, in battle with a new god, representing our future world. Ritual. We look forward to its conclusion in which our violence has eliminated our enemy and brought into being a new world. Enmity, violence, totally new world. Here the story to the ritual is 'remaking the nation'.</div><div>- Ritual is a kind of social technology. Our experience with kindness, love, with everything good tells us this machine of ritual blocks them from coming to be.* Technology applied to religious experience is the identifying of social models. Religious experience applied to world of science is doing something about the wrong social technologies when we see them coming.&nbsp;</div><div>- The power of science will still be in the hands of rulers who'll use it to kill their enemies and take total control of the lives of their own people. You might have reconciled religious experience with technology by identifying a model, but what can we do with a mere model against that power?</div><div>- In trying to bring the world of good into the world of science, models that bring together both worlds help us stay focused, reach consensus on what kind of social behaviors are dangerous.</div><div>- As for example violence, total control, hatred of strangers.<br /><br /><br />2.<br /><br />- I know you like, or rather are in love with your model bringing the good of the world into science. I have some doubts.<br />- About what?<br />- Your and Russell's good is kindness, love, and the rest of the qualities we say we feel in religious experience. But scientists are also making models bringing together with the world of science, not religious experience, but consciousness. According to some all the world, from our thinking to the orbits of planets, is an ongoing computation, and consciousness is the computer that the program doing the computation runs on.<br />- It's no more than an interesting metaphor. One variation has it that consciousness is a machine of endlessly computing self reflection: self aware of self that is aware of self that is aware of self.... But religious experience of an unmoving whole without parts doesn't fit with a counting that adds up to infinite parts and infinite movement.<br />- They deny the reality of religious experience.<br />- Russell's response:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><i>It is obvious that a man who can see knows things which a blind man cannot know; but a blind man can know the whole of physics. Thus the knowledge which other men have and he has not is not a part of physics.**</i></blockquote>Consciousness has tasks much larger than computing.<br /><br /><br />Further Reading:<br /><a href="http://rextyranny.blogspot.com/2014/05/united-states-not-totalitarian-country.html">The United States &amp; Totalitarianism</a><br /><a href="http://rextyranny.blogspot.com/2014/05/the-technology-of-good-and-other-stories.html">The Technology Of Good&nbsp;</a><br /><a href="http://rextyranny.blogspot.com.es/2012/01/filet-mignon-readers_14.html">Filet Mignon Readers</a><br />_________________<br /><i><a href="http://rextyranny.blogspot.com/2013/01/noam-chomsky-and-mental-things.html">* Noam Chomsky &amp; Mental Things</a></i><br /><i>** Bertrand Russell, The Analysis of Matter, 1954</i></div></div>Rex Millerhttps://plus.google.com/110577386864036108962noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3300118830951645356.post-47904707298468330652018-02-16T01:13:00.000-08:002018-02-21T09:24:37.344-08:00Heaven Must Have Been Short 20 Angels<img alt="Image result for angel icon" height="100" src="https://encrypted-tbn3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRWRSn3ao5LhCHPGjtf88sZH5eUKIuH3dyKASn2n___mJA6Ufr4" width="200" /><br /><br />(Originally posted 12/16/2012)<br /><br />- Do you know something?<br />- What?<br />- The 20 young children shot yesterday at school...<br />- It's all over the news. Incomprehensible, senseless, the extreme of evil.<br />- Is that how you describe it?<br />- How would you describe it?<br />- Evil I can't argue with. But incomprehensible and senseless, no. There is a lot to be said...<br />- Can't you just be quiet for once? People don't massacre children every day. How can it be typical?<br />- Because it is an expression of our times. Chesterton said nothing could be more stupid than telling people to go ahead and act bad and it will all work out for the best, that promoting economic and personal selfishness would lead to a good and stable society.<br />- What good does killing children do anyone?<br />- What would you say is the ultimate in selfishness?<br />- Take from the people around you and give nothing back.<br />- Exactly. Don't get angry.<br />- I'm trying. But this is a tragedy. Your theories are disrespectful.<br />- It looks like I'm trying to profit intellectually from terrible pain.<br />- Yes.<br />- Though maybe we can learn from this. Should I go on?<br />- Yes.<br />- Doing anything useful in society is a failure of selfishness. In a logic where selfishness is believed to create a good society destructiveness should create a better society.<br /><div>- You're saying these insane killers think of themselves as cultural heroes?</div>- They&nbsp;take the best away and give nothing in return, and killing themselves leave nothing behind that can be taken back. They achieve the maximum of selfishness.<br />- And an ideal society is the result.<br /><br />Further Reading:<br /><a href="https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-are-you-an-anarchist-the-answer-may-surprise-you">Are You An Anarchist?</a>&nbsp; (or&nbsp;<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-G19LwrJwkw">Listen</a>)Rex Millerhttps://plus.google.com/110577386864036108962noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3300118830951645356.post-31700767585796825552018-02-14T07:40:00.001-08:002018-02-18T01:39:55.626-08:00Political & Personal<img src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/72/Schraube_und_archimedische_Spirale.png/220px-Schraube_und_archimedische_Spirale.png" style="font-size: large;" /><br /><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: small;">1.</span><br /><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: small;">- Four times now in the past month I've read that our political problems will remain with us until people become more intellectual, less atomized, less party loyal.&nbsp;</span><br /><span style="font-size: small;">- And you don't think that's true.</span><br /><span style="font-size: small;">- It occurs to me this claim is related to the way liberal politicians keep surprising me with their betrayals. Let me ask you a question. Say our political goal is independence, justice, to be left in peace by others. Why would anyone open himself up to a stranger for the purpose of getting to the goal of a politics which would control strangers to our benefit, allow us to stay closed to strangers? For that is what it means to be more social, more open, more smart about our relations to others, but only for the sake of a political goal, not the relations themselves.</span><br /><span style="font-size: small;">- Putting personal relations in the service of politics, hypocrisy is built in.&nbsp;</span><br /><span style="font-size: small;">- I wonder. If you ask someone to engage in liberal politics with you so to be left alone, at any moment your political comrade may leave you alone too.</span><br /><span style="font-size: small;">- And that is what you think liberal leaders always do?</span><br /><span style="font-size: small;">- Yes.</span><span style="font-size: small;">&nbsp;So I thought then we have start the other way around.</span><br /><span style="font-size: small;">- Which is?</span><br /><span style="font-size: small;">- Like in Plato's <i>Republic</i>, where politics are discussed, not for their own sake, but as a means to improve personal life and understanding.</span><span style="font-size: small;">&nbsp;Our leaders betray us, and they always will, so long as they keep asking us to get together only to change our politics, to keep us better apart and safe from each other's crimes.&nbsp;</span><br /><span style="font-size: small;">- Can you give me an example of discussion of politics made to serve personal understanding?</span><br /><span style="font-size: small;">- Easy, I already have: leaders betraying us after doing the opposite.</span><br /><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: small;">2.</span><br /><br />-&nbsp; I'm not saying you're wrong. I think there's some truth in your ideas. Our leaders betray us because they have power and we don't, and they develop class loyalty with those like themselves with power, and see us, the people they lead, as children in their power to be managed as they see fit. I also think there's truth in your argument that our leaders, proposing better ways of keeping us from assaulting and robbing each other, end up keeping themselves in isolation from us too. But...<br />- But?<br />- I think the level of discussion is wrong. Put together ideas of class, and efficiency of each of us like a part in a clock to be kept in maximal order and free from damage from the other parts, and what do we get? We get a materialism of selves. We get economics. And economics, as a primary description of human nature, is insane.<br />- Tell me how.<br />- Have you ever heard our leaders say that capitalism does not necessarily involve employment by hire? or the hoarding of unused property? That both can be forbidden without challenge to private property and investment?<br />- Those are anarchist ideas.<br />- Yes they are. You don't like them? Then add back in employment for hire and hoarding of unused property and you get classic capitalism: the employed are also consumers, and three kinds of insanity arise: first, that of class relations, master to slave.<br />- The insanity there?<br />- Of vanity. Thinking that you are a kind of thing, a master, a slave, defined by your repetitive relation to another person seen as a kind of thing.<br />- Why is that insane?<br />- Because the power to force a repetition of that relation is felt to be a power over the world as a whole, when in fact maintaining that relation results in less power, blindness and ignorance of the world outside of the relation between classes.<br />- Ok. Next.<br />- The next insanity is the employers' doing for the sake of doing. Endless, pointless, continued pursuit of profit for profit sake. A classic example of compulsive behavior.<br />- Ok. Next.<br />- Hallucination in the necessity to create a world in which money creates money, that world where more and more money is needed to fund the slaves' consumption of products at prices higher than their wages.<br />- Vanity, Compulsion, Hallucination. You've sold me. Our leaders, by promising us a mere economic rearrangement, an alteration in the world of things, are living in a world of insanity, and can't help but fall victim to it themselves.<br /><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: small;">Further Reading:</span><br /><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://rextyranny.blogspot.com.es/2017/11/leaders-who-betray.html">Leaders Who Betray</a></span><br /><a href="http://rextyranny.blogspot.com.es/2010/06/i-suppose-i-should-be-embarrassed.html">Community</a>Rex Millerhttps://plus.google.com/110577386864036108962noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3300118830951645356.post-30796026611251285062018-02-06T05:57:00.003-08:002018-02-07T01:11:50.373-08:00The Honor Of Thieves<a href="http://cartype.com/pages/564/aston_martin_dbs__2008" style="background-color: #c0a154; color: #ff3300; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13.524px;"><img height="145" src="https://images-blogger-opensocial.googleusercontent.com/gadgets/proxy?url=http%3A%2F%2Fcartype.com%2Fpics%2F3660%2Ffull%2Fastonmartin_dbs_street.jpg&amp;container=blogger&amp;gadget=a&amp;rewriteMime=image%2F*" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); border: none; box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.5) 1px 1px 5px; padding: 8px; position: relative;" width="200" /></a><br /><br />- Spain is out to show Catalonia who's boss.* I don't know if this is a stupid question, but why would the leaders of a democracy want to oppress a nationality, a state, an ethnicity? Democracies at least in theory are about equality. Or not?<br />- Democracies are about equality, but equality always within a limited class.** Democracy is about sharing of power, and political equality is only between those who have power. Democracy has always existed together with unequal, oppressive power relations between classes: rich/poor; men/women; old/young; white/black. <br />- But democracy, even if it is only equality within a class, in our times at least isn't it progressively making inroads on those class oppressions?<br />- Until the mid-seventies maybe. From then on free-market neoliberalism began to be imposed. Presented as an increase in democracy, it is in fact the reverse.<br />- How so?<br />- Protection from regulation of marketplace collusion and monopolization is provided to those who can influence the government in their favor, that is, the very rich and large corporations. For the rest, equal freedom to trade with anyone means in practice being subject to the unrestricted manipulations of the market on the part of the rich and large corporations. For most, free trade results in being less able to sell what they make, and more likelihood they will have to sell themselves by the hour to one of the very companies manipulating the market with the assistance of the government. Political freedom is bought by the rich and the corporations, their money granting them a kind of democratic equal access, while the people are left unprotected, left with a useless freedom to buy and sell subject to gangs of economic predators.<br />- In our democracies, all sorts of class oppressions are in operation, and if you are right, to participate in a free market means to belong to an a class oppressed by another class, the rich and corporations monopolizing markets with the protection of the government. Free market 'capitalism' instead of promoting democracy, actively works in the opposite direction.<br />- A sort of paradox. Freedom leads to inequality.<br />- The second paragraph of the U.S. Declaration Of Independence reads, 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness'. In <i>Common Sense, </i>published the same year as the Declaration,&nbsp;Thomas Paine wrote that government is to protect from human misdeeds, society is to further human good nature. Here are Paine's words:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">SOME writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher.</blockquote>The equality we look for is a product of society, not government, where it is no more moral than the honor of thieves.<br />- Put that way, obviously to be equally free of necessary protection of the government is not desirable.<br />- The confusion about equality arises from a reversal of expectations - the fact that the class receiving equality is the lower class - and from the overlap in classifications. A property owning adult white male may be said to have political equality with other property owning adult white males, and have economic equality as members of the free market, but in one case they are members of a class of superior power, and in the other case they are members of a class power is imposed upon. Political equality within their class and superiority to other classes doesn't protect them from economic oppression in the free market by the more powerful class supervising it.<br /><br />Further Reading:<br /><a href="http://rextyranny.blogspot.com.es/2017/11/real-democracy.html">Real Democracy</a><br />__________________________<br /><i>*&nbsp;<a href="http://rextyranny.blogspot.com.es/2018/02/the-situation-in-catalonia.html">The Situation In Catalonia</a></i><br /><i>** Samuel Johnson, on American demands for independence: "How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?" Slaves made up 20% of the population of early 18th century New York City.</i>Rex Millerhttps://plus.google.com/110577386864036108962noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3300118830951645356.post-63343927176164874322018-02-02T00:41:00.001-08:002018-02-06T06:04:57.611-08:00The Situation In Catalonia<a class="image" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Coat_of_Arms_of_Catalonia.svg" style="background: none rgb(248, 249, 250); color: #0b0080; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 12.6px; text-align: center;" title="Coat of arms of Catalonia"><img alt="Coat of arms of Catalonia" data-file-height="950" data-file-width="529" height="117" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/29/Coat_of_Arms_of_Catalonia.svg/65px-Coat_of_Arms_of_Catalonia.svg.png" srcset="//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/29/Coat_of_Arms_of_Catalonia.svg/98px-Coat_of_Arms_of_Catalonia.svg.png 1.5x, //upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/29/Coat_of_Arms_of_Catalonia.svg/130px-Coat_of_Arms_of_Catalonia.svg.png 2x" style="border: 0px; vertical-align: middle;" width="65" /></a><br /><br />- Since you're there, tell me, what's happening in Catalonia?<br />- The state, or "autonomous community", of Catalonia sought to hold a referendum on the question of independence from Spain. Spain forbid the referendum, declaring it illegal, as the constitution (like most) does not allow succession. Spain sent the national police to try to stop the voting, injuring many people in the process. The vote was in favor of independence. The Catalonia legislature declared independence. Spain cried: Sedition! arrested many members of the Catalonia government, and utilizing a provision of the constitution took over direct control of the Catalan government. The president, with a Spanish arrest warrant in his name, remains safe from arrest in Belgium. Spain ordered new elections in Catalonia. A separatist majority was the result as in the previous election, and the same president the choice. Spain says Catalonia can't have a "fugitive" as president, and says it will arrest him if he tries to return to Catalonia.*<br />- And what is it all about?<br />-&nbsp;Ferran&nbsp;Requejo,** a&nbsp;professor of politics in Barcelona,&nbsp;says there are three good reasons for succession when the constitution doesn't freely allow it: there is good cause, a sort of breech of the contract the constitution establishes; a nationality or minority is oppressed culturally or economically; or the will of the people is expressed by vote to leave. Spain's neoliberal policies have blocked Catalan attempts to take care of the poor;*** Spain has limited the use of the Catalan language in schools; Catalonia transfers consistently more taxes to the national government than it gets back; and the national government has used violence attempting to stop voting in Catalonia, and now arrested members of the Catalan government.<br />- And what does the national government say?<br />- That they are enforcing the law. Requejo argues that by Spain's violence, economic and cultural oppression, the contract made by the constitution has been broken so a declaration of independence cannot be "sedition". It's a way of Catalonia saying to Spain, 'If you are independent of your obligations to us, we are independent of you.'<br />- So it's not about nationalism?<br />- The president says no. Anyone, he says, can be a Catalan.<br />- The Catalans are oppressed but there is no Catalan nation.<br />- In fact, that is right. Do you want to talk about this?<br />- I do.<br />- The subject is "class". A class is a group, a collection of individuals.<br />- With something in common.<br />- Yes, and no. The something in common may be only that each in the class is treated the same way by each in another class. In the theory of moral decline from the practice of agriculture, the repetitive acts of farming, producing grain after grain, leads to a sense of power, security in the ability to perform the same actions. As the grain is seen as the instrument of safety and power, other human beings come to be seen in the same way. They get put into the class, "people who can be repetitively acted upon in a certain way," by other people who alike act upon them in that way. Do you follow?<br />- Yes.<br />- Capitalism can be seen as an instance of this, with the repetitive act of seeking profit become an end in itself, and classes of people being made the tool of the profit making class.<br />- Profits are counted. Vanity, security, sense of power results. Classes of people made into the instrument of that repetitive action.<br />- Yes. Now the actions of class on class tend to overwhelm all other human relations. The profit making classes compete with each other to achieve monopoly status: the greatest possible number of repetitions, of actions class on class, with the greatest safety; capitalists can't stop seeking more profit without losing position to other capitalists in the race to monopoly. Should they try to stop they find they no longer have capacity or opportunity to do anything else: the relation master to servant of the profit making class to the class of their tools is destructive of other human relations which are not repetitive and do not seek power and security.<br />- The argument of Aristotle that profit making could only not<i> </i>be harmful if it was done for the advantage of the household, and not for its own sake.<br />- Exactly. So what we find is that capitalism, that is, the class of profit makers, is constantly seeking new classes of people to make into tools. They tend to fall into the category of race, when they are located in the periphery, tend to be described by ethnicity or nationality, when it is a question of one state seeking to take advantage of another, and by class, when within the same state.**** Because in each case the relation is defined by the fact of use by the dominating class, the actual character of the class is not involved. A North African migrant worker can be described racially as black, while having light skin color. A woman is paid less in the United States not because of any weakness, or having any less need for money, but because she is assigned to a class that is to be made use of by another class of people. In the same way, as monopoly progresses, prices are set not by competition but by class relation, producer class to consuming class, with each producer in the class setting price in the same way, leaving consumers no choice but to pay.<br />- As an English peasant, after public lands had been enclosed, or a worker in the periphery after local agriculture had been destroyed, has no choice but to accept to work in a factory.<br />- To return now to Catalonia. It can be a reality that class is imposed, without any supposed nature of the class (justifying inferior status as tool) having reality. But sometimes there is reality to the class. Catalonia does have its own language.<br />- Then the fight in Catalonia is a fight about nationalism?<br />- That doesn't follow. Aristotle's statement about profit making being allowable when in the service of the household applies to class relations generally: you can defend against an imposition of class relations, without practicing class relations yourself outside your defense.<br />- Speaking Catalan in your own household is not a class relation.<br />- Yes.<br /><br />Further Reading:<br /><a href="http://rextyranny.blogspot.com.es/2018/02/class-equality.html">Class &amp; Equality</a><br /><a href="http://rextyranny.blogspot.com.es/2017/11/leaders-who-betray.html">Leaders Who Betray</a><br /><a href="http://rextyranny.blogspot.com.es/2015/04/zombies-vampires-sleepwalkers.html">Zombies, Vampires, Sleepwalkers, Psychopaths, Monopolists</a><br /><a href="http://rextyranny.blogspot.com.es/2013/06/there-is-no-conspiracy-because-there.html">There Is No Conspiracy Because There Are No People</a><br />_________________________<br /><i>* In an annual report on democracies worldwide</i>&nbsp;<i>by British think tank 'Economist Intelligence Unit', in the ranking of 'full democracies' Spain is now last, in 19th place. "The national government’s attempt to stop Catalonia’s illegal referendum on independence on October 1st by force and its repressive treatment of pro-independence politicians have put it at risk of becoming a 'flawed democracy,''' the report states.</i><br /><i>** See:&nbsp;</i>Ferran&nbsp;Requejo,&nbsp;<i><a href="http://www.euskomedia.org/PDFAnlt/rievcuadernos/11/11078092.pdf">Secession theories &amp; processes in plurinational democracies. The Catalan case</a>. In a personal communication,&nbsp;</i>Ferran&nbsp;Requejo expresses himself generally in favor of federation of democracies, -- so long as the federal government acts democratically.<br /><i>*** "For example, the Spanish constitutional court annulled Catalan Parliament policies including a guaranteed basic income, poverty reduction measures, a tax on nuclear waste and sugarised beverages. More recently, Madrid imposed punitive restrictions on the right of the City of Barcelona to use its budget surplus carry out social projects, and prohibited the housing of refugees in facilities that the City had built for that purpose." (Yanis Varoufakis, DiEM25)</i><br />****&nbsp;<i><a href="http://rebels-library.org/files/ambig_ident.pdf">Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, Balibar and Wallerstein.&nbsp;</a></i>Rex Millerhttps://plus.google.com/110577386864036108962noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3300118830951645356.post-3078199675573294732018-01-30T09:41:00.001-08:002018-02-02T00:32:16.490-08:00They Want You Ruined<div><img src="https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQJ-41KKny-yM_JFGw0-uPNk1Y8YNB5gTolcB3eSKRtZBwb7mCrQw" /></div><div><br /></div>- Let's talk about money.<br />- Let's.<br />- Since the 2008 collapse the government has created over $3 trillion of new money, without producing much inflation. Where did all that money come from? Where did it go to?<br />- The government "loaned" money to the Federal Reserve Bank or "sold" bonds.&nbsp; Either way, it made up money and transferred it, on terms of repayment. Easy terms of repayment, because banks can generate many times the amount of money from taking on that debt.<br />- How?<br />- They are required to keep only a small percentage of the money they have. The rest they can loan at interest. The money loaned eventually is deposited in another bank, where it too can be loaned, minus the reserve percentage. From bank to bank the money goes, less each time; ultimately many times the original deposit has been loaned.<br />- Where did the new trillions created go?<br />- The majority of Americans now have no assets, while banks and corporations are said to have trillions in un-invested cash on hand...<br />- The money went to the rich.<br />- A good guess.<br />- Why doesn't the government simply make up the money? <br />- This system is thought to be a brake on how much money the government can make up thus helping the money be more worthy of trust. But to get around the brake, all the banks had to do was find a way to bring into the system something like money but not subject to the fractional reserve requirement, and that is what they did with bundles of loans they 'deposit' with, loan to, pass on variously to each other, endlessly circulating and endlessly establishing collateral on the basis of which they loan out more money. Since the 2008 crash they've continued to do this in ever more elaborate ways.<br />- I understand: as long as banks keep the money circulating among themselves, its multiplication doesn't create inflation in the real economy. But while all this money is being created, isn't an equal amount being owed? Where's the profit?<br />- The profit accumulates to the rich as&nbsp;fees are charged, interest and salaries paid, stock dividends awarded. When money can be infinitely created those costs are insignificant. A part of the money funds the Federal deficit, a part pays corporations for war supplies, a part goes into the pockets of financiers.<br />- Won't money lose its value?<br />- The value of money is tied to what it can buy. Ultimately, its money is accepted because the government has the power to use force to acquire and give in exchange something real.<br />- I've thought in the past that the so-called austerity policies that crash economies were used to further monopoly by handing over for pennies privatized public property and foreclosed private property, and by undermining small business and self-employment in general. And deliberately crashed economies create a climate of fear authoritarian leaders use to justify repressive policies. Could it also be that punishing, authoritarian posturing is meant as a sign of government willingness to take property, whether the taking is called taxation, penalty, privatization, repossession or confiscation, and whether the taking is more from the poor than the rich, and thus backs up the money supply that otherwise has nothing behind it? Is financial speculation one of a pair with authoritarianism?Rex Millerhttps://plus.google.com/110577386864036108962noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3300118830951645356.post-78391263282978802812018-01-23T11:24:00.001-08:002018-01-24T01:49:39.592-08:00Will Pop Science End The World?&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;<a class="_hes" href="https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.slate.com%2Fcontent%2Fdam%2Fslate%2Farchive%2F2009%2F03%2F1_123125_2093564_2208788_2213739_090317_sci_narcissism2tn.jpg.CROP.promo-large.jpg&amp;imgrefurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.slate.com%2Farticles%2Fhealth_and_science%2Fscience%2F2009%2F03%2Fbut_enough_about_you_.html&amp;docid=4t--DmZLWRVijM&amp;tbnid=OylArponrIlMKM%3A&amp;vet=1&amp;w=718&amp;h=512&amp;bih=374&amp;biw=731&amp;ved=0ahUKEwi-mb_Zo9TTAhUHjlQKHVFYB2IQMwgsKAswCw&amp;iact=c&amp;ictx=1" style="color: #660099; font-family: roboto, arial, sans-serif; font-size: small; height: auto; width: auto;"><img alt="Related image" class="target_image irc_rii" src="https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTdfizOqO7Qd68JjvuMR5axH3oiQbARau26cRZxCqlr3hFi5WhMrQ" style="height: 80px; margin-left: -16px; margin-top: 0px; opacity: 0.8; width: 112px;" /></a><br /><br />- I've found something I think you'll like.<br />- You're getting good at that.<br />-&nbsp;The Israeli historian Yuval&nbsp;Harari's book&nbsp;<i>Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind </i>and its sequel have sold more than a million copies. Human beings, its story goes, developed by getting together in large groups, this made possible by a new ability to make up and tell each other fictions. From this innovation, the next was agriculture, which made life more burdensome but facilitated the aforementioned communication. The scientific revolution followed.<br />- And?<br />- The story Harari tells is of technological progress, but not necessarily progress in how well life is lived.<br />- Not a new idea. Technology is in the hands of leaders and increases their power to hold their positions at the expense of everyone else.<br />- Yes. But, he observes, a social technology, involving human rights, seems to be bringing progress to our times, progress in the scientific sense of a more efficient society. But human rights are fictions like all other stories people tell each other in order to keep on communicating with each other. Science may not be good for us, but we can't say no to whatever efficiency creating story evolution sticks us with. The problem is, Harari thinks that the ruling class of the future will bio-engineer itself into a different species. And with robots making most people obsolescent, and masses no longer needed as slaves or soldiers, the leaders will create their own more efficient fiction that justifies leaving behind everyone else.<br />- He can't claim this is bad, moral claims are fictions; he can't say it is inefficient, by definition it is. So what's his intention? To scare people? On what basis can he argue it is good to guard the general efficiency of humanity against a future elite's monopolized efficiency?<br />- Obviously, he can't. His only good is efficiency. From learning how to communicate in lies, to the agricultural<i>&nbsp;</i>and the&nbsp;scientific revolution's misery inducing revolutions, efficiency comes at a high cost.<br />- But - really, this is a stupid game - unless Harari shows that lives lived less well means inefficiency, our complaining is merely something we say to each other about each other and of no account at all.<br />- Technology progresses, we distinguish ourselves from other species by our learning to communicate better and form large groups, until finally, maybe, at the end of progress we don't find being in large groups efficient. The human rights fictions will no longer be efficient, and consequently will be abandoned.<br />- In sum: technological progress creates misery, social ideas to control that misery are false and ultimately will be abandoned relegating the masses to elimination if that is what proves most efficient. A reverse evolution of Homo Sapiens'&nbsp;supposed unique attribute of communication efficiency will have occurred. Why do you think a million people paid money to read this?<br />- People enjoy being scared - at a distance, playing just pretend, and what can this claim be, in the logic of the argument, but another fiction? But here's what I'll think you'll like. If the human species is reverse evolving itself out of its species-specific efficiency of communication, then we will be becoming literally idiots, in the entomological meaning&nbsp;from the Greek <i>idiōtēs</i>, <i>private person</i>. Harari recently wrote an article for a newspaper claiming that we are relatively safe from a future major war because it doesn't pay these days for big countries to fight wars. But, he concludes, you can't underestimate human stupidity. Yet why should leaders care if their county's whole population dies so long as they and friends don't? Technological progress of the kind predicted, bringing with it a species regression in communication, means they won't. They'll be idiots.Rex Millerhttps://plus.google.com/110577386864036108962noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3300118830951645356.post-27866904156778109492018-01-15T05:58:00.002-08:002018-01-19T07:22:06.284-08:00A Time Of Beauty<div></div><div><img alt="Image result for alchemy" height="149" src="https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQaiW007tk_O0YxfW83UootU_X3YUOuBmMh-yEyaSxANZqEm9VNMg" width="200" /><br /><br /><i>(Continued from </i><a href="http://rextyranny.blogspot.com/2018/01/birthday-man.html">Birthday &amp; The Man</a><i>)</i></div><div><br /></div>- What are coincidences then?<br />- Reversals. Improbable events reversing expectation of the probable.<br />- If they are merely improbabilities, why do we feel like they mean something?<br />- Because we feel like we deserve to expect them.<br />- Expecting improbability? Improbabilities become probable?<br />- Yes! I mentioned Amazon last time. I'm want to tell you about my experience with that company. But first let me say I spent all my life avoiding the world Amazon typifies, all my life up until a few years ago. I got out. I ran away. I judged that a good life was improbable in the America of money and only money. And this is what I want to tell you: I was right. All those years of being out, now that I'm in, partly in, I look back on as a time of beauty. <br />- A time of beauty.<br />- You object to the phrase?<br />- How does coincidence fit in?<br />- Coincidence tells you that your decision based on probability, which after all is all we ever have to go on, was correct.<br />- 'They' tell you: who is that 'they'? How are coincidences a 'they'?<br />- We have to decide the must important things in our lives based on probabilities, and sometimes when we do, and are right, improbabilities start assembling themselves; and what I think is they are telling us <i>things are different now</i>, that turning our backs on, calculating probabilities in the world we knew, we were right in how we decided. <br />- 'They' are telling us?<br />- As beauty speaks to us: improbability, coincidence is the world getting our attention, notifying us in advance the probability of the return of love. You accept that the world can speak to us with its beauty?<br />- Yes, I think I do. Reversals of probabilities, when they involve our own lives, are somehow beautiful. Tell me about Amazon.<br />- A company about money and only money. A company that exists to provide quantities of things cheaper and monopolize markets. Quantity and cheapness has made them the world's largest retailer and granted them monopoly status. Like the products sold, employees are cheap and handled in multitudes. Employee costs in relation to profits are minimal. Computer programs record every movement of every employee, measuring efficiency second by second. But a surprise is in store for you when newly hired you show up to work. No manager is there. You are expected to train yourself by following around the other employees. Amazon has managers, but their salaries are so much greater than yours that it is not efficient for them to show up and manage you. In fact, the managers are managed in the same way themselves, their efficiency controlled by other managers whose own efficiency is monitored by other managers. <br />- Everyone is watching and no one is managing. How is that efficient?<br />- Without the monopoly profits it wouldn't be. But as this is a company about money and only money, management is not competent to do anything else. In its surveillance of employees by employees themselves surveilled the company never sees a human being, no manager ever decides like a human being. It's amazing. It's the end of the world. The employees hate the company, hate what they are doing, and have no interest in the other employees they immediately see hate the company and what they are doing. Why bother discussing it with each other? <br />- You misunderstood me earlier. I wasn't objecting to your 'time of beauty.' I was thinking rather that this kind of, as you put it, listening to the world is something entirely different from probability: it is all or nothing. Similarly, I think you're saying of our world of money it too is an absolute in the way it talks to us. Am I right?<br />- Yes. Beauty or its opposite: if they address themselves to us even for a moment they spread out in memory and imagination occupying everything there is.<br />- But still. If you had made an effort and talked to the employees maybe they'd have turned out to have lives just like yours.<br />- Unlikely. Probabilities are important. Time is limited. It was time to go.Rex Millerhttps://plus.google.com/110577386864036108962noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3300118830951645356.post-441821662187120502018-01-13T02:37:00.001-08:002018-01-15T08:56:43.323-08:00Correspondences<table class="infobox vcard" style="background-color: #f8f9fa; border-spacing: 3px; border: 1px solid rgb(162, 169, 177); clear: right; color: black; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 12.32px; line-height: 1.5em; margin: 0.5em 0px 0.5em 1em; padding: 0.2em; width: 22em;"><tbody><tr><td class="logo" colspan="2" style="text-align: center; vertical-align: top;"><a class="image" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Amazon_logo_plain.svg" style="background: none; color: #0b0080;"><img alt="Amazon logo plain.svg" data-file-height="181" data-file-width="602" height="66" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/70/Amazon_logo_plain.svg/220px-Amazon_logo_plain.svg.png" srcset="//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/70/Amazon_logo_plain.svg/330px-Amazon_logo_plain.svg.png 1.5x, //upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/70/Amazon_logo_plain.svg/440px-Amazon_logo_plain.svg.png 2x" style="border: 0px; vertical-align: middle;" width="220" /></a></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><i>(Continued from</i> <a href="http://rextyranny.blogspot.com.es/2018/01/birthday-man.html">Birthday &amp; The Man</a><i>)</i><br /><br />- What we said about Goethe's <i>Elective Affinities</i>,* that it was the opposite of the romantic call to accept passion as opposed to reason I always thought it was, I have to admit is hard for me to accept. I looked back at Goethe's views on nature, and found, in fact, they were in accord with our dismissal of thinking of ourselves as things moved by things, parts moved by parts. For him science was or ought to be like perception: seeing things as a whole, seeing how things were composed. But -<br />- Yes?<br />- In <i>Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship</i> there are major religious and mystical elements: a whole separate novel is inserted of a woman who wishes to live entirely in religious feeling; and in the main story there is another woman who has an intimate relation with astronomical movements, with the stars and the planets, with the Cosmos. What do you make of this?<br />- I'm afraid you'll think I'm joking.<br />- 'It seems my fate to be in the wrong with you about the smallest things. I must be very good-natured to overlook such an unfailing superiority as yours.' **<br />- Fine. Jonas, you remember, the author of <i>The Phenomenon Of Life, </i>describes life as an interrelation with the world, involved in the world by feeling its intrusions, and willing in turn to intrude on it, in a constant movement that retains the form of life, with the goal of self preservation through constant remaking of itself. 'Will' and 'feeling' are not, he says, facts about the world: they are not parts of things put in movement against other parts. They involve a sense of direction. That is, they involve a selection between possible arrangements of the world. Freedom of how to speak of the world, how to see the world, arises out of the fixed 'vocabulary' of things come to be known.<br />- We respond to the world, we feel it, and willing it to take on a preferred arrangement we act on it.<br />- Yes. The character who is detached from the world in religious feeling can be seen to be, by an act of will, standing back from the world, being 'the knower of the field'. And the character who's in intimate relation to the cosmos, and can perhaps act on it to make it better, that reflects the capacity life has to will the world into shape. Well?<br />- Here's the thing. Brain scientists, neurophysicists, whatever they are calling themselves now, they imagine they don't feel and don't will. They call mental states epiphenomena. That is, things in a world of parts moving parts but which themselves don't have parts therefore can't be anything. How can people be so stupid? They say they know how to talk about the world and if some part of the world doesn't let them talk that way they say it must not be in the world. Where is it then?<br />- A good question. Do you know, I think the reason, as you put it, they can be so stupid is that they know the experience of making an error in their conclusions, dumping the bad idea, and backtracking.<br />- But dumping a bad idea, a logical progression or scheme of classification, is not the same as dumping knowledge of your own experience.<br />- It is, if you never consider these kinds of questions.<br />- And they don't.<br />- They never consider these kind of questions because they can't imagine how the freedom that comes of not having parts acting on each other is related to the lack of freedom in having parts acting on each other.<br />- Can you?<br />- Has Goethe given you any ideas?<br />- Yes and no. Sometimes he seems to believe in meaningful coincidences, fate, a personal destiny, the world taking on a form that suits our will; other times he seems to be making fun of the idea, for example showing that when Wilhelm thought he was pursuing his own way in life actually a secret society had been guiding his fate.<br />- Try putting that together with Goethe's views on nature.<br />- The science he said he wanted to do was of making representations, rather than explanations.<br />- Yes. We know that when science looks for a relation of explanations to each other it looks for whether the parts in one move the parts in the other. What is the relation of representations to each other?<br />- I don't know.<br />- What about when we talk?<br />- Yes, you already said that with a fixed vocabulary we have infinite freedom in ways of combining words into sentences. Representations are kinds of symbols. But how does that solve our problem?<br />- Our feeling of the world is a perception of the world, of how what we see is composed as a whole, and this knowledge, coming about through our body's response to the world, is unfree, part acting on part. But the will's use of that perception, how it puts it together with other perceptions, is unlimited, like the unlimited way of combining words into sentences. That perception, knowledge, feeling all arise together gives will something to grab hold of, without being tied to, or determined by.<br />- I can't say I'm convinced.<br />- Then let's return to <i>Wilhelm Mesiter's Apprenticeship </i>and the strange confusion of fate that is being followed and directed at the same time. The coincidences that occur in the story and Wilhelm thinks are fate but may really have been staged by the benevolent secret society: the staging can be like feeling, the act of the world on us, that is also perception and knowledge, and his impression of fate is his will to make his life his own.<br />- And why the coincidences?<br />- They are like words in a sentence that seem to go together, to be representing the world, but where the sentence goes, how it concludes, is up to him. I'll tell you something that happened last night in the courtyard up the street. A very well dressed woman in her late 60s sat down on the bench next to me, first time anyone had done that in the month I'd been going there. I strike up a conversation with her: she takes out a notebook and starts writing down words - in Catalan, French, English - suggested to her by the objects nearby, the color of my thermal flask, the name of the man on the cover of magazine in her lap, the words or subjects from our conversation struggling through bits of many languages. Separating parts of words from each other, these parts she then interpreted and connected to the other words, or their parts. And these words and suggestions were related to her recent experiences, places she had been and the words associated with them or seen there. She makes sure, she says, connections lead her in a positive direction. This was a first coincidence: I'd hours before finished reading Pullman's new fantasy&nbsp;<i>La Belle Sauvage, </i>in<i>&nbsp;</i>which a clockwork (but mysterious exactly how) device, the alethiometer, in response to questions, reads out symbols that yield layer upon layer of interpretations. The elegant woman tells me she wants to write to Amazon, the internet retailer, about something she's discovered. She takes out a metal box of pastilles, on the lid the brand 'Bezos', also the name of Amazon's founder. I tell her that Amazon's grocery delivery service I briefly worked for in L.A. has its Barcelona warehouse occupying the next block's interior courtyard, the block where I'm staying. Another coincidence. And then she, on the subject of these courtyards inside residential blocks, tells me the drug company Beyer which she once worked for, and I too once worked for in Budapest, used to be here in this courtyard before the city cleared it out to be reopened to the public. There I sit every day using the wifi from the Toyota showroom along one side.<br />- Good thing you don't write novels.<br />- You'll have to excuse me if my coincidences&nbsp;don't stand up against Goethe's. Like the times we live in they are mostly commercial: objects exchanged as if people involved don't matter, rather than the reverse, exchange of objects that don't matter except in their bringing people together.*** But that only makes it clearer, doesn't it?<br />- What clearer?<br />- That the coincidences are objects, parts of things tied to parts of things, meaningless in themselves, freely made use of to make our relation to people better.<br /><br />Further Reading:<br /><a href="http://rextyranny.blogspot.com.es/2018/01/a-time-of-beauty.html">A Time Of Beauty</a><br />________________________<br /><i>* <a href="http://rextyranny.blogspot.com.es/2018/01/this-talk-of-science-individuality.html">Elective Affinities</a></i><br />**&nbsp;<i>Denis Diderot, 'Supplement to Bougainville's Voyage' (1772)</i><br /><i>*** See&nbsp;Marcel Mauss</i>Rex Millerhttps://plus.google.com/110577386864036108962noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3300118830951645356.post-53295616492719094342018-01-09T10:13:00.004-08:002018-01-10T00:26:59.190-08:00Elective Affinities<a class="image" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Goethe_(Stieler_1828).jpg" style="background: none rgb(248, 249, 250); color: #0b0080; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 12.32px; text-align: center;"><img alt="Goethe (Stieler 1828).jpg" data-file-height="2432" data-file-width="1972" height="200" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/0e/Goethe_%28Stieler_1828%29.jpg/220px-Goethe_%28Stieler_1828%29.jpg" srcset="//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/0e/Goethe_%28Stieler_1828%29.jpg/330px-Goethe_%28Stieler_1828%29.jpg 1.5x, //upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/0e/Goethe_%28Stieler_1828%29.jpg/440px-Goethe_%28Stieler_1828%29.jpg 2x" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); border: 0px; box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.5) 1px 1px 5px; padding: 8px; position: relative; vertical-align: middle;" width="162" /></a><br /><br />(Continued From <a href="http://rextyranny.blogspot.com/2018/01/birthday-man.html">Birthday &amp; The Man</a>)<br /><br />- This talk of science, individuality, society, is putting me out, putting me off. I can't even talk.<br />- Sure you can.<br />- An individual's life ought to be naturally, reasonably, intelligently worked into society. Making the different parts involved and how they relate to each other the subject of conversation doesn't begin to tell me how to do that.<br />- What does?<br />- Stories of people trying.<br />- I'm listening.<br />- We've looked at&nbsp;<i>Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship</i>.* Goethe's last novel, according to him his best and requiring three readings for full comprehension, was&nbsp;<i>Elective Affinities.</i>&nbsp;The title refers to an account of the way two chemical elements that are compounded together, in the presence of another compound of two elements, each of the two joined elements separates, and each of the two parts of each compound joins instead to one of the two parts of the other compound.<br />- The compounds separate only to combine with the separated elements of the other compound.<br />- Yes. At the beginning of the story the chemical dance of changing partners comes up in conversation, with obvious application to present company: the rich aristocrat Eduard, his wife Charlotte, the Eduard's friend the Captain who's come to stay, and his wife's absent, but under consideration for invitation, protege Ottilie. Charlotte immediately observes such application would be an unrealistic simplification.<br />- Which is Goethe's position?<br />- We'll get there. An aristocrat, it is said in <i>Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship</i>, must make a show of good breeding, but need not actually have it and consequently usually doesn't. Eduard and his wife in <i>Elective Affinities</i>&nbsp;had both made previous marriages of convenience, though they were in love with each other even then, and only the death of both their spouses allowed them ten years later to marry.<br />- Marriages of convenience evidence of living more for show than natural impulse.<br />- Yes. Now it comes to pass that Eduard falls in love with the invited Ottilie, his wife to a lesser extent with the Captain. All four characters have the syllable 'ott' in their names: the Captain's name is Otto, that is also one of Eduard's names, his wife's name is Charlotte, and then there's Ottilie. We said about science that it relates classes of parts of things to classes of parts of things. The parts of things in the class are treated as if they were identical, varying from each other only in place or movement. In <i>tableau vivants</i> organized at the castle living people enact famous pictures, according to the narrator improving upon them but leaving an uneasy feeling in the audience: the living have become 'elements' in the picture, parts of themselves that have their being among parts of other people and the background of the scene presented.<br />- What's Goethe's point? Eduard and his wife were proper aristocrats, making a show of good breeding. Then, when opportunity arises and love interests more to their taste arrive, they - again? - in acting on their passion are merely putting on a show, they've lowered themselves to the status of elements of a picture? They're all instances of "otts", are drops of chemicals, dabs of paint?<br />- So it would seem. The prime activity of Eduard, his family, his friends, and employees is remaking the extensive grounds of the castle into parkland, drawing out its beauty, making it a show of itself. The characters live in a strict hierachy: Eduard is served by his wife, she by her protege Ottilie, Ottilie by her own protege and numerous servants, and below them all: the poor. Special police are employeed to keep beggers away from the family and friends' elaborate celebrations of birthdays, that is, their shows to the glory of themselves and their 'quality'.<br />- How does the story end?<br />- To be guilty of a simplification like the analogy of elective affinities itself: Ottilie and Eduard each die of being unable to accept appearances of themselves. Ottilie resists breaking up Eduard and Charlotte's marriage; taking on the daily care of the newly delivered, surprise child of that marriage, her carelessness leads to its accidental death by drowning. She stops talking; then stops eating and dies. Eduard, seeing himself without her as permanently bereaved, is found dead in his chair.<br />______________________<br /><i>* <a href="https://rextyranny.blogspot.com.es/2017/12/romantic-life.html">Romantic Lives</a></i>Rex Millerhttps://plus.google.com/110577386864036108962noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3300118830951645356.post-64642655066443541802018-01-03T01:28:00.001-08:002018-01-16T10:12:49.441-08:00Birthday & The Man<div><a class="image" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Goethe_(Stieler_1828).jpg" style="background: none rgb(248, 249, 250); color: #0b0080; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 12.32px; text-align: center;"><img alt="Goethe (Stieler 1828).jpg" data-file-height="2432" data-file-width="1972" height="200" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/0e/Goethe_%28Stieler_1828%29.jpg/220px-Goethe_%28Stieler_1828%29.jpg" srcset="//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/0e/Goethe_%28Stieler_1828%29.jpg/330px-Goethe_%28Stieler_1828%29.jpg 1.5x, //upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/0e/Goethe_%28Stieler_1828%29.jpg/440px-Goethe_%28Stieler_1828%29.jpg 2x" style="border: 0px; vertical-align: middle;" width="162" /></a><br /><br />1.<br /><br />- Correct me if I'm wrong, but we both really like the novel <i>Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship</i>, despite not liking, or rather, not being interested in its author.<br />- Go on.<br />- Wilhelm believes in the romantic life of following desire and chance where they lead. To more responsible parties that involves treating unexamined desires as necessity, and letting chance lead you into radical improvidence, into failure to secure the minimum practical necessities of life.<br />- 'For if we do not know our environment, we shall mistake our dreams for a part of it, and so spoil our science by making it fantastic, and our dreams by making them obligatory.'&nbsp;&nbsp;George Santayana.<br />- Interesting quote, but I don't want to go in that direction. Wilhelm's problem is not reality, or even fantasy.<br />- What is Wilhelm's problem?<br />- Whether there can be an art to life, whether life as a whole can be a work of art.<br />- In his other works Goethe suggests instead that life is a matter of will, of reiterated and left behind bouts of creativity.<br />- But in this novel things are more complex. The argument is made that a secure foundation, a family, or a patron, or a society of friends, is required to take care of necessities whereupon chance can be followed, and become the basis of creative response, whether in life or in art. Wilhelm's actress-mistress assumes such a necessity of secure foundation, understands the insecurity of Wilhelm's intended life in the theater, and at the end of the novel it is revealed that at least partly the romantic sequence of supposed chance events has been a secret society's show produced to educate Wilhelm.<br />- Educate him to the importance of security upon which rely episodes of creative response to life, with life not having meaning as a whole.<br />- Except that what is so wonderful about the novel is that it gives exactly the opposite impression, of the romantic life of chance having meaning. Wilhelm is, unbeknownst to him, living within a show put on by secret friends, but he, within that show, acquires for himself an adoptive family, a boy and a girl.<br />- Creativity is not just in responding to chance, but in choosing the conditions of necessity. The society of friends adopt him, he adopts the children.<br />- Yes. What do you think?<br />- I'm thinking.<br />- The question hits close to home.<br />- In my experience, in finding the chosen foundation in the midst of romance, and so solving the problem of arbitrariness of chance, practical necessity is neglected and the whole falls apart.<br />- Where does that leave us?<br />- In great difficulty. Wilhelm explains to busnessman Werther: 'How immensely, dear friend, do you err in believing that a work, the first presentation of which is to fill the whole soul, can be produced in broken hours scraped together from other extraneous employment. No: the poet must live wholly for himself, wholly in the objects that delight him. Heaven has furnished him internally with precious gifts; he carries in his bosom a treasure that is ever of itself increasing; he must also live with this treasure, undisturbed from without, in that still blessedness which the rich seek in vain to purchase with their accumulated stores.' A family or patron must be found to take care of practical necessity, on which basis you can seek your own chosen family, in relation to, love and care for which, your episodic creative use of chance has its meaning.<br />- Problem solved.<br />- If your problem is writing a novel in which these ideas are explored. If your life as an artist is a series of such willful acts of reiterated creativity.<br />- But that is not the idea in this novel.<br />- No. If your problem is putting these ideas into effect, not merely in art, but in your life, unless you were born to the necessary conditions you have to rely on chance to create them. You must become a romantic against your will.<br /><br /><br />2.</div><div><br />- Happy birthday.</div><div>- Thanks. Sometimes after passing through periods of your life when you hardly recognize yourself you wonder if it is your life you are leading and not a set of inconsistent lives going on under your name.<br />- Certain philosophers say that ego or sense of self is an illusion; we are in constant change; we are like a nation, citizens of which change constantly. What gives us an idea of self is no more than physical and mental continuity.<br />- And you believe that?<br />- No. You don't either.<br />- Then what do you believe makes a self, allows a life to have consistency, even in periods where your life hardly can be recognized?<br />- Consciousness.<br />- Consciousness comes and goes with sleep and accident, and has different degrees.<br />- Comes and goes, yes; no, different degrees. Degree reflects only how far consciousness has gone, or not.<br />- Explain.<br />- Computer scientists look for consciousness on the model of one part of the brain looking on and modifying another, but that's not it. Consciousness is a relation of rest to activity; a standing outside of time and space, looking down on the actions of the past.<br />- The "Knower of the Field", as the&nbsp;Bhagavad Gita has it.<br />- Yes. Unlike the self, which is nothing but a mix of experiences, perceptions, and desires, a special kind of consciousness, the consciousness of good, immediately reestablishes connection after a break.<br />- How exactly?<br />- You know Kant's way of founding morality?<br />- Remind me.<br />- Being moral is doing what we all, if we were rational, would agree to do.<br />- And why should we care to follow that rule?<br />- Because we want to more than anything else. Do you know why we want to? (This is not Kant anymore.) Because it places us, in relation to our fellow human beings, in the same relation we are to ourselves in consciousness.<br />- Again, explain.<br />- I'm not sure how much I can. You take over.<br />- You assume I agree with you.<br />- You do.<br />- When, knowers of the field, we're detached from desires impelling us to action, the world we see is beautiful, people's action good, statements true; such a world is like the universality of reason in moral judgment that is able to include everyone in its overview. Even in periods like the year I'm coming out of all can be brought together, even if it is related and included only by noting the love that conspicuously was lacking.<br />- Everything is brought together, seen under the sign of eternity.<br />- And that is where consciousness goes, when it lessens in degree? Into eternity?<br />- It comes from nowhere at the beginning of life and goes to nowhere at the end; why not travels also in the middle?<br />- Are there places of return in nowhere, and other places of no way back?<br />- 'Places in nowhere!'<br />- A strange combination of words, but maybe not stranger than the statement we can conclude with: that we are most ourselves when are in agreement with all.<br /><br /><br />3.<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><i>But use of reason, as a means, is compatible with any end, no matter how irrational.*</i></blockquote>- I've been reading, thinking. Consciousness, in the perception of beauty, goodness, and truth, solves the problem of seeing ourselves as disparate collections of parts. But, as Hans Jonas* says, isn't consciousness itself what leads us into seeing separate things in relation to each other? Sight, Jonas says, gives to us an instantaneous assembly of different parts ranged from near to far and right to left. Those assemblies of parts are then what science uses experimentally putting them in different relations and giving them a push to see what happens, looking for a regular relation between the assemblies, and that regular relation allows predictions of perceptions. Science comes out of an understanding of what perception is that only the collecting together, seeing all at once,&nbsp;<i>and then standing back from</i>, of consciousness makes possible.<br />- Science beginning in consciousness of perception. What conclusion do you draw from this?<br />- First, it was already clearly seen at the beginnings of our civilization in the myth of knowledge bringing a fall, and in Parmenides' view that knowledge of things was an illusion but necessary to be acquired.<br />- Is there no other way to acquire knowledge?<br />- There certainly is. It is the way an artist learns to use materials by the use of them, building up habits which bring regular results.<br />- How is that different from what is done in science?<br />- It is the thing itself that is being learned, not how arrangements of different things can be made to change.&nbsp;If I want to see whether heavier things fall faster than light things, I put a heavy thing a yard above the ground and let it fall, then do the same with a lighter thing, and see if the elapsed time is the same or not. I haven't learned anything about any individual thing that fell, except that it is a part of a large collection - that of all things - that fall at the same rate.** There is beauty in scientific, artificial perception let's call it, in its truth. But this truth involves the falsity that isolated things exist separate from one another. In fact we learn about the world through intimate repeated contact with it,*** culminating in a sense of beauty which removes the 'thingness' of its parts. Things we learn in this way we resist being destroyed. No so the objects of perceptions that science puts in relation to each other. We do not form bodily habits in responses to classes of things like 'things that fall', they do not build up into a natural perception. The beauty of scientific truth is derivative, resides in its power of recalling to mind actual perceptions of beauty.<br />- Consciousness gives us the things of science and suggests what to do with them. Scientific perceptions are different from personal perceptions: they aren't beautiful so we don't inordinately care about them. Is that a problem?<br />- Absolutely! Because, as we talked about last time, personal knowledge and perception easily take on the form of scientific perception. And then we don't know any more who or what we are.<br />- Then we need only keep the two apart.<br />- Only! Do we even know if the relation master to slave, dominance to submission isn't the product of consciousness discovering the artifice of scientific perception, perhaps with the beginnings of agriculture? Once hierarchical relations**** are established, nothing is more useful or rather essential than maintaining the priority of artificial perception.*****<br /><br /><br />4.<br /><br />-&nbsp;<i>Do</i>&nbsp;we even know 'if the relation master to slave, dominance to submission isn't the product of consciousness discovering the artifice of scientific perception, perhaps with the beginnings of agriculture?'<br />- We don't know, but we have good reasons for thinking so. Pre-literate societies were in general not hierarchical: roles complemented roles, things were directed to those who needed them, people felt connected to each other. One suggestion is that the hunting male's aggression was turned against the female, the old's insecurity and fear against the young. But fear and aggression breaking out when the communal form of society made them unnecessary is what we need to explain, and can't be its cause. Another suggestion is that an inner will to dominate that has always has been present but repressed in human nature finally breaks out. But again: why this break out when dominance had been effectively controlled by the rules of communal society?<br />- Then perhaps we, like some animals, started practicing dominance rituals, impelled by that inner darkness.<br />- Same problem: why regress to dominance rituals, when ritual had been turned to sypathetic imitation of nature spirits, making us feel secure by alliance to regularities of nature and seeming by the strength of our security to hold nature to continuing that regularity.<br />- So what happened?<br />- Resident, settled agriculture. The practices of hunting and gathering are occasional: they come and go with time of day and season. Resident, settled agriculture is present to us all the time. Technique can be applied continuously.<br />- And that is like the cycle of modern science, where knowledge gained is immediately applied, observing the results of which new knowledge is gained.<br />- Yes.&nbsp; Also, hunting and gathering take us to different places, but our action on the field is on the same field. We see the results of applying the last perception in what we see now before us.<br />- And that is Jonas' consciousness of perception that makes us aware of parts.<br />- Yes. The field is no longer something independent, with its own characteristic events, but a thing with separate parts enmeshed in the cycle of our perception and applied knowledge.<br /><br /><br />5.<br /><br />- This talk of science, individuality, society, is putting me out, putting me off. I can't even talk.<br />- Sure you can.<br />- An individual's life ought to be naturally, reasonably, intelligently worked into society. Making the different parts involved and how they relate to each other the subject of conversation doesn't begin to tell me how to do that.<br />- What does?<br />- Stories of people trying.<br />- I'm listening.<br />- We've looked at&nbsp;<i>Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship</i>. Goethe's last novel, according to him his best and requiring three readings for full comprehension, was&nbsp;<i>Elective Affinities.</i>&nbsp;The title refers to an account of the way two chemical elements that are compounded together, in the presence of another compound of two elements, each of the two joined elements separates, and each of the two parts of each compound joins instead to one of the two parts of the other compound.<br />- The compounds separate only to combine with the separated elements of the other compound.<br />- Yes. At the beginning of the story the chemical dance of changing partners comes up in conversation, with obvious application to present company: the rich aristocrat Eduard, his wife Charlotte, the Eduard's friend the Captain who's come to stay, and his wife's absent, but under consideration for invitation, protege Ottilie. Charlotte immediately observes such application would be an unrealistic simplification.<br />- Which is Goethe's position?<br />- We'll get there. An aristocrat, it is said in&nbsp;<i>Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship</i>, must make a show of good breeding, but need not actually have it and consequently usually doesn't. Eduard and his wife in&nbsp;<i>Elective Affinities</i>&nbsp;had both made previous marriages of convenience, though they were in love with each other even then, and only the death of both their spouses allowed them ten years later to marry.<br />- Marriages of convenience evidence of living more for show than natural impulse.<br />- Yes. Now it comes to pass that Eduard falls in love with the invited Ottilie, his wife to a lesser extent with the Captain. All four characters have the syllable 'ott' in their names: the Captain's name is Otto, that is also one of Eduard's names, his wife's name is Charlotte, and then there's Ottilie. We said about science that it relates classes of parts of things to classes of parts of things. The parts of things in the class are treated as if they were identical, varying from each other only in place or movement. In&nbsp;<i>tableau vivants</i>&nbsp;organized at the castle living people enact famous pictures, according to the narrator improving upon them but leaving an uneasy feeling in the audience: the living have become 'elements' in the picture, parts of themselves that have their being among parts of other people and the background of the scene presented.<br />- What's Goethe's point? Eduard and his wife were proper aristocrats, making a show of good breeding. Then, when opportunity arises and love interests more to their taste arrive, they - again? - in acting on their passion are merely putting on a show, they've lowered themselves to the status of elements of a picture? They're all instances of "otts", are drops of chemicals, dabs of paint?<br />- So it would seem. The prime activity of Eduard, his family, his friends, and employees is remaking the extensive grounds of the castle into parkland, drawing out its beauty, making it a show of itself. The characters live in a strict hierachy: Eduard is served by his wife, she by her protege Ottilie, Ottilie by her own protege and numerous servants, and below them all: the poor. Special police are employeed to keep beggers away from the family and friends' elaborate celebrations of birthdays, that is, their shows to the glory of themselves and their 'quality'.<br />- How does the story end?<br />- To be guilty of a simplification like the analogy of elective affinities itself: Ottilie and Eduard each die of being unable to accept appearances of themselves. Ottilie resists breaking up Eduard and Charlotte's marriage; taking on the daily care of the newly delivered, surprise child of that marriage, her carelessness leads to its accidental death by drowning. She stops talking; then stops eating and dies. Eduard, seeing himself without her as permanently bereaved, is found dead in his chair.<br /><br /><br />6.<br /><br />- What we said about Goethe's&nbsp;<i>Elective Affinities</i>, that it was the opposite of the romantic call to accept passion as opposed to reason I always thought it was, I have to admit is hard for me to accept. I looked back at Goethe's views on nature, and found, in fact, they were in accord with our dismissal of thinking of ourselves as things moved by things, parts moved by parts. For him science was or ought to be like perception: seeing things as a whole, seeing how things were composed. But -<br />- Yes?<br />- In&nbsp;<i>Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship</i>&nbsp;there are major religious and mystical elements: a whole separate novel is inserted of a woman who wishes to live entirely in religious feeling; and in the main story there is another woman who has an intimate relation with astronomical movements, with the stars and the planets, with the Cosmos. What do you make of this?<br />- I'm afraid you'll think I'm joking.<br />- 'It seems my fate to be in the wrong with you about the smallest things. I must be very good-natured to overlook such an unfailing superiority as yours.' ******<br />- Fine. Jonas, you remember, the author of&nbsp;<i>The Phenomenon Of Life,&nbsp;</i>describes life as an interrelation with the world, involved in the world by feeling its intrusions, and willing in turn to intrude on it, in a constant movement that retains the form of life, with the goal of self preservation through constant remaking of itself. 'Will' and 'feeling' are not, he says, facts about the world: they are not parts of things put in movement against other parts. They involve a sense of direction. That is, they involve a selection between possible arrangements of the world. Freedom of how to speak of the world, how to see the world, arises out of the fixed 'vocabulary' of things come to be known.<br />- We respond to the world, we feel it, and willing it to take on a preferred arrangement we act on it.<br />- Yes. The character who is detached from the world in religious feeling can be seen to be, by an act of will, standing back from the world, being 'the knower of the field'. And the character who's in intimate relation to the cosmos, and can perhaps act on it to make it better, that reflects the capacity life has to will the world into shape. Well?<br />- Here's the thing. Brain scientists, neurophysicists, whatever they are calling themselves now, they imagine they don't feel and don't will. They call mental states epiphenomena. That is, things in a world of parts moving parts but which themselves don't have parts therefore can't be anything. How can people be so stupid? They say they know how to talk about the world and if some part of the world doesn't let them talk that way they say it must not be in the world. Where is it then?<br />- A good question. Do you know, I think the reason, as you put it, they can be so stupid is that they know the experience of making an error in their conclusions, dumping the bad idea, and backtracking.<br />- But dumping a bad idea, a logical progression or scheme of classification, is not the same as dumping knowledge of your own experience.<br />- It is, if you never consider these kinds of questions.<br />- And they don't.<br />- They never consider these kind of questions because they can't imagine how the freedom that comes of not having parts acting on each other is related to the lack of freedom in having parts acting on each other.<br />- Can you?<br />- Has Goethe given you any ideas?<br />- Yes and no. Sometimes he seems to believe in meaningful coincidences, fate, a personal destiny, the world taking on a form that suits our will; other times he seems to be making fun of the idea, for example showing that when Wilhelm thought he was pursuing his own way in life actually a secret society had been guiding his fate.<br />- Try putting that together with Goethe's views on nature.<br />- The science he said he wanted to do was of making representations, rather than explanations.<br />- Yes. We know that when science looks for a relation of explanations to each other it looks for whether the parts in one move the parts in the other. What is the relation of representations to each other?<br />- I don't know.<br />- What about when we talk?<br />- Yes, you already said that with a fixed vocabulary we have infinite freedom in ways of combining words into sentences. Representations are kinds of symbols. But how does that solve our problem?<br />- Our feeling of the world is a perception of the world, of how what we see is composed as a whole, and this knowledge, coming about through our body's response to the world, is unfree, part acting on part. But the will's use of that perception, how it puts it together with other perceptions, is unlimited, like the unlimited way of combining words into sentences. That perception, knowledge, feeling all arise together gives will something to grab hold of, without being tied to, or determined by.<br />- I can't say I'm convinced.<br />- Then let's return to&nbsp;<i>Wilhelm Mesiter's Apprenticeship&nbsp;</i>and the strange confusion of fate that is being followed and directed at the same time. The coincidences that occur in the story and Wilhelm thinks are fate but may really have been staged by the benevolent secret society: the staging can be like feeling, the act of the world on us, that is also perception and knowledge, and his impression of fate is his will to make his life his own.<br />- And why the coincidences?<br />- They are like words in a sentence that seem to go together, to be representing the world, but where the sentence goes, how it concludes, is up to him. I'll tell you something that happened last night in the courtyard up the street. A very well dressed woman in her late 60s sat down on the bench next to me, first time anyone had done that in the month I'd been going there. I strike up a conversation with her: she takes out a notebook and starts writing down words - in Catalan, French, English - suggested to her by the objects nearby, the color of my thermal flask, the name of the man on the cover of magazine in her lap, the words or subjects from our conversation struggling through bits of many languages. Separating parts of words from each other, these parts she then interpreted and connected to the other words, or their parts. And these words and suggestions were related to her recent experiences, places she had been and the words associated with them or seen there. She makes sure, she says, connections lead her in a positive direction. This was a first coincidence: I'd hours before finished reading Pullman's new fantasy <i>La Belle Sauvage,&nbsp;</i>in<i>&nbsp;</i>which a clockwork (but mysterious exactly how) device, the alethiometer, in response to questions, reads out symbols that yield layer upon layer of interpretations. The elegant woman tells me she wants to write to Amazon, the internet retailer, about something she's discovered. She takes out a metal box of pastilles, on the lid the brand 'Bezos', also the name of Amazon's founder. I tell her that Amazon's grocery delivery service I briefly worked for in L.A. has its Barcelona warehouse occupying the next block's interior courtyard, the block where I'm staying. Another coincidence. And then she, on the subject of these courtyards inside residential blocks, tells me the drug company Beyer which she once worked for, and I too once worked for in Budapest, used to be here in this courtyard before the city cleared it out to be reopened to the public. There I sit every day using the wifi from the Toyota showroom along one side.<br />- Good thing you don't write novels.<br />- You'll have to excuse me if my coincidences&nbsp;don't stand up against Goethe's. Like the times we live in they are mostly commercial: objects exchanged as if people involved don't matter, rather than the reverse, exchange of objects that don't matter except in their bringing people together.******* But that only makes it clearer, doesn't it?<br />- What clearer?<br />- That the coincidences are objects, parts of things tied to parts of things, meaningless in themselves, freely made use of to make our relation to people better.<br /><br /><br />7.<br /><div><br /></div>- What are coincidences then?<br />- Reversals. Improbable events reversing expectation of the probable.<br />- If they are merely improbabilities, why do we feel like they mean something?<br />- Because we feel like we deserve to expect them.<br />- Expecting improbability? Improbabilities become probable?<br />- Yes! I mentioned Amazon last time. I'm want to tell you about my experience with that company. But first let me say I spent all my life avoiding the world Amazon typifies, all my life up until a few years ago. I got out. I ran away. I judged that a good life was improbable in the America of money and only money. And this is what I want to tell you: I was right. All those years of being out, now that I'm in, partly in, I look back on as a time of beauty.<br />- A time of beauty.<br />- You object to the phrase?<br />- How does coincidence fit in?<br />- Coincidence tells you that your decision based on probability, which after all is all we ever have to go on, was correct.<br />- 'They' tell you: who is that 'they'? How are coincidences a 'they'?<br />- We have to decide the must important things in our lives based on probabilities, and sometimes when we do, and are right, improbabilities start assembling themselves; and what I think is they are telling us&nbsp;<i>things are different now</i>, that turning our backs on, calculating probabilities in the world we knew, we were right in how we decided.<br />- 'They' are telling us?<br />- As beauty speaks to us: improbability, coincidence is the world getting our attention, notifying us in advance the probability of the return of love. You accept that the world can speak to us with its beauty?<br />- Yes, I think I do. Reversals of probabilities, when they involve our own lives, are somehow beautiful. Tell me about Amazon.<br />- A company about money and only money. A company that exists to provide quantities of things cheaper and monopolize markets. Quantity and cheapness has made them the world's largest retailer and granted them monopoly status. Like the products sold, employees are cheap and handled in multitudes. Employee costs in relation to profits are minimal. Computer programs record every movement of every employee, measuring efficiency second by second. But a surprise is in store for you when newly hired you show up to work. No manager is there. You are expected to train yourself by following around the other employees. Amazon has managers, but their salaries are so much greater than yours that it is not efficient for them to show up and manage you. In fact, the managers are managed in the same way themselves, their efficiency controlled by other managers whose own efficiency is monitored by other managers.<br />- Everyone is watching and no one is managing. How is that efficient?<br />- Without the monopoly profits it wouldn't be. But as this is a company about money and only money, management is not competent to do anything else. In its surveillance of employees by employees themselves surveilled the company never sees a human being, no manager ever decides like a human being. It's amazing. It's the end of the world. The employees hate the company, hate what they are doing, and have no interest in the other employees they immediately see hate the company and what they are doing. Why bother discussing it with each other?<br />- You misunderstood me earlier. I wasn't objecting to your 'time of beauty.' I was thinking rather that this kind of, as you put it, listening to the world is something entirely different from probability: it is all or nothing. Similarly, I think you're saying of our world of money it too is an absolute in the way it talks to us. Am I right?<br />- Yes. Beauty or its opposite: if they address themselves to us even for a moment they spread out in memory and imagination occupying everything there is.<br />- But still. If you had made an effort and talked to the employees maybe they'd have turned out to have lives just like yours.<br />- Unlikely. Probabilities are important. Time is limited. It was time to go.<br /><br />Further Reading:<br /><a href="http://rextyranny.blogspot.com.es/2014/03/killer-metaphysics_26.html">Killer Metaphysics</a><br />______________________<br /><i>* The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology, Hans Jonas, 1966.</i><br /><i>** "Organism is seen as primarily determined by the conditions of its existence, and life is understood in terms of the organism-environment situation rather than in terms of the exercise of an autonomous nature." Ibid, Second Essay, 'Philosophic Aspects of Darwinism'.</i><br /><i>***&nbsp;</i><i>"Food cultivation, practiced in a truly ecological sense, presupposes that the agriculturist is familiar with all the features and subtleties of the terrain on which the corps are grown. He must have a thorough knowledge of the physiography of the land, its variegated soils’ — crop land, forest land, pasture land — mineral and organic content, and its microclimate, and he must be engaged in a continuing study of the effects produced by new flora and fauna. He must develop his sensitivity to the land’s possibilities and needs while becoming an organic part of the agricultural situation."&nbsp;</i><i>(Ecology and Revolutionary Thought, Murray Bookchin, 1964.)</i><br /><i>****&nbsp;</i><i>Seeing oneself as a thing in a world of things generates fear. As the thing you are is defined in relation to the things other people are, since you as an individual are never interacted with by others or known to yourself, when that relation to others changes, you become invisible to yourself. You have no idea what to expect; fear arises and leads to violent, passionate action on other people seen as things to reestablish relation and thus visibility. Hierarchy is established as other people seen as things are forced into stable relation to you, doing what you decide best reflects back your stability as a thing, your power to maintain relation. See:&nbsp;<a href="http://rextyranny.blogspot.com.es/2014/09/noam-chomsky-mental-things.html">Noam Chomsky &amp; Mental Things.</a></i><br /><i>***** See:&nbsp;<a href="http://rextyranny.blogspot.com.es/2017/11/leaders-who-betray.html">Leaders Who Betray</a>.&nbsp;</i><br />******&nbsp;<i>Denis Diderot, 'Supplement to Bougainville's Voyage' (1772)</i><br /><i>******* See: Marcel Mauss</i></div>Rex Millerhttps://plus.google.com/110577386864036108962noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3300118830951645356.post-12352607889274506402017-12-30T09:13:00.000-08:002018-01-03T01:21:55.594-08:00Consciousness, Science, Perception<a class="irc_mil i3597 iEQvhylbgA0s-zixyDjKkw5M" data-href="https://www.pinterest.com/pin/296393219217540662/" data-noload="" data-ved="0ahUKEwj1zODq2I_XAhUY6mMKHdV5B6gQjRwIBw" href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&amp;rct=j&amp;q=&amp;esrc=s&amp;source=images&amp;cd=&amp;ved=0ahUKEwj1zODq2I_XAhUY6mMKHdV5B6gQjRwIBw&amp;url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.pinterest.com%2Fpin%2F296393219217540662%2F&amp;psig=AOvVaw1KL242hGT-MCA7AkG8LTcX&amp;ust=1509155551812385" jsaction="mousedown:irc.rl;keydown:irc.rlk" rel="noopener" style="background-color: #222222; border: 0px; color: #660099; cursor: pointer; font-family: roboto, arial, sans-serif; font-size: small; text-align: center;" tabindex="0" target="_blank"><img alt="Image result for schizophrenia" class="irc_mi" height="198" src="https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/8d/c4/d6/8dc4d613b2976df38dec308c61d3d854.jpg" style="background-color: white; background-image: -webkit-linear-gradient(45deg, rgb(239, 239, 239) 25%, transparent 25%, transparent 75%, rgb(239, 239, 239) 75%, rgb(239, 239, 239)), -webkit-linear-gradient(45deg, rgb(239, 239, 239) 25%, transparent 25%, transparent 75%, rgb(239, 239, 239) 75%, rgb(239, 239, 239)); background-position: 0px 0px, 10px 10px; background-size: 21px 21px; border: 0px; box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.65) 0px 5px 35px; margin-top: 0px;" width="200" /></a><br /><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><i>But use of reason, as a means, is compatible with any end, no matter how irrational.*</i></blockquote><br />(<i>Continued from </i><a href="http://rextyranny.blogspot.com.es/2017/12/personal-lives.html">Personal Lives</a>)<br /><br />- I've been reading, thinking. Consciousness, in the perception of beauty, goodness, and truth, solves the problem of seeing ourselves as disparate collections of parts. But, as Hans Jonas* says, isn't consciousness itself what leads us into seeing separate things in relation to each other? Sight, Jonas says, gives to us an instantaneous assembly of different parts ranged from near to far and right to left. Those assemblies of parts are then what science uses experimentally putting them in different relations and giving them a push to see what happens, looking for a regular relation between the assemblies, and that regular relation allows predictions of perceptions. Science comes out of an understanding of what perception is that only the collecting together, seeing all at once, <i>and then standing back from</i>, of consciousness makes possible.<br />- Science beginning in consciousness of perception. What conclusion do you draw from this?<br />- First, it was already clearly seen at the beginnings of our civilization in the myth of knowledge bringing a fall, and in Parmenides' view that knowledge of things was an illusion but necessary to be acquired.<br />- Is there no other way to acquire knowledge?<br />- There certainly is. It is the way an artist learns to use materials by the use of them, building up habits which bring regular results.<br />- How is that different from what is done in science?<br />- It is the thing itself that is being learned, not how arrangements of different things can be made to change.&nbsp;If I want to see whether heavier things fall faster than light things, I put a heavy thing a yard above the ground and let it fall, then do the same with a lighter thing, and see if the elapsed time is the same or not. I haven't learned anything about any individual thing that fell, except that it is a part of a large collection - that of all things - that fall at the same rate.** There is beauty in scientific, artificial perception let's call it, in its truth. But this truth involves the falsity that isolated things exist separate from one another. In fact we learn about the world through intimate repeated contact with it,*** culminating in a sense of beauty which removes the 'thingness' of its parts. Things we learn in this way we resist being destroyed. No so the objects of perceptions that science puts in relation to each other. We do not form bodily habits in responses to classes of things like 'things that fall', they do not build up into a natural perception. The beauty of scientific truth is derivative, resides in its power of recalling to mind actual perceptions of beauty.****<br />- Consciousness gives us the things of science and suggests what to do with them. Scientific perceptions are different from personal perceptions: they aren't beautiful **** so we don't inordinately care about them. Is that a problem?<br />- Absolutely! Because, as we talked about last time, personal knowledge and perception easily take on the form of scientific perception. And then we don't know any more who or what we are.<br />- Then we need only keep the two apart.<br />- Only! Do we even know if the relation master to slave, dominance to submission isn't the product of consciousness discovering the artifice of scientific perception, perhaps with the beginnings of agriculture? Once hierarchical relations***** are established, nothing is more useful or rather essential than maintaining the priority of artificial perception.******<br /><br /><br />2.<br /><br />- <i>Do</i> we even know 'if the relation master to slave, dominance to submission isn't the product of consciousness discovering the artifice of scientific perception, perhaps with the beginnings of agriculture?'<br />- We don't know, but we have good reasons for thinking so. Pre-literate societies were in general not hierarchical: roles complemented roles, things were directed to those who needed them, people felt connected to each other. Some suggest that the hunting male's aggression was turned against the female, the old's insecurity and fear against the young. But fear and aggression breaking out when the communal form of society made them unnecessary is what we need to explain, and can't be its cause. Another suggestion is that an inner dominance always has been present in human nature, a fear of domination which finally breaks out. But again: why this break out when dominance had been effectively controlled by the rules of communal society? <br />- Then perhaps we, like some animals, started practicing dominance rituals, acting on the suggestion of our inner darkness.<br />- Same problem: why regress to dominance rituals, when ritual had been turned to sypathetic imitation of nature spirits, making us feel secure by alliance to regularities of nature and seeming by the strength of our security to hold nature to continuing that regularity. <br />- So what happened?<br />- Resident agriculture. Improving skills in the hunt, in gathering, is occasional: these activities are tied to cycles of day night, the seasons. In resident agriculture, evidence of the success or failure of technique is continuously before us. We can apply our technique continuously.<br />- And that is like the cycle of modern science, where knowledge gained is immediately applied, observing the results of which new knowledge is gained.<br />- Yes.&nbsp; Also, hunting and gathering take us to different places, but our action on the field is on the same field. We see the results of the last perception in what we see now before us.<br />- And that is Jonas' consciousness of perception that makes us aware of parts.<br />- Yes. The field is no longer something independent, with its own characteristic events, but a thing with separate parts enmeshed in the cycle of our perception and applied knowledge. <br /><br />Further Reading:<br /><a href="http://rextyranny.blogspot.com.es/2014/03/killer-metaphysics_26.html">Killer Metaphysics</a><br />______________________<br /><i>* The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology, Hans Jonas, 1966.</i><br /><i>** "Organism is seen as primarily determined by the conditions of its existence, and life is understood in terms of the organism-environment situation rather than in terms of the exercise of an autonomous nature." Ibid, Second Essay, 'Philosophic Aspects of Darwinism'.</i><br /><i>***&nbsp;</i><i>"Food cultivation, practiced in a truly ecological sense, presupposes that the agriculturist is familiar with all the features and subtleties of the terrain on which the corps are grown. He must have a thorough knowledge of the physiography of the land, its variegated soils’ — crop land, forest land, pasture land — mineral and organic content, and its microclimate, and he must be engaged in a continuing study of the effects produced by new flora and fauna. He must develop his sensitivity to the land’s possibilities and needs while becoming an organic part of the agricultural situation."</i><br /><i>(Ecology and Revolutionary Thought, Murray Bookchin, 1964.)</i><br /><i>****&nbsp;</i><i>The continuous cycle of perception and application of modern science is ugly: beauty is in rest, learning new habits of perception after repeated acts on the world that acts on us; our science never rests, so never presents an immediate world to develop habits of response to.</i><br /><i>*****&nbsp;</i><i>Seeing oneself as a thing in a world of things generates fear. As the thing you are is defined in relation to the things other people are, since you as an individual are never interacted with by others or known to yourself, when that relation to others changes, you become invisible to yourself. You have no idea what to expect; fear arises and leads to violent, passionate action on other people seen as things to reestablish relation and thus visibility. Hierarchy is established as other people seen as things are forced into stable relation to you, doing what you decide best reflects back your stability as a thing, your power to maintain relation. See: <a href="http://rextyranny.blogspot.com.es/2014/09/noam-chomsky-mental-things.html">Noam Chomsky &amp; Mental Things.</a></i><br /><i>****** See:&nbsp;<a href="http://rextyranny.blogspot.com.es/2017/11/leaders-who-betray.html">Leaders Who Betray</a>.&nbsp;</i>Rex Millerhttps://plus.google.com/110577386864036108962noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3300118830951645356.post-24532979162067736882017-12-28T15:15:00.001-08:002017-12-30T09:20:59.789-08:00Personal Lives<div><img height="150" src="https://i.ytimg.com/vi/f4LkiMtRtSc/0.jpg" width="200" /></div><div><br /></div><div>- Happy birthday.</div><div>- Thanks. Sometimes after passing through periods of your life when you hardly recognize yourself you wonder if it is your life you are leading and not a set of inconsistent lives going on under your name.<br />- Certain philosophers say that ego or sense of self is an illusion; we are in constant change; we are like a nation, citizens of which change constantly. What gives us an idea of self is no more than physical and mental continuity. <br />- And you believe that?<br />- No. You don't either.<br />- Then what do you believe makes a self, allows a life to have consistency, even in periods where your life hardly can be recognized?<br />- Consciousness.<br />- Consciousness comes and goes with sleep and accident, and has different degrees.<br />- Comes and goes, yes; no, different degrees. Degree reflects only how far consciousness has gone, or not.<br />- Explain.<br />- Computer scientists look for consciousness on the model of one part of the brain looking on and modifying another, but that's not it. Consciousness is a relation of rest to activity; a standing outside of time and space, looking down on the actions of the past.<br />- The "Knower of the Field", as the&nbsp;Bhagavad Gita has it. <br />- Yes. Unlike the self, which is nothing but a mix of experiences, perceptions, and desires, a special kind of consciousness, the consciousness of good, immediately reestablishes connection after a break. <br />- How exactly?<br />- You know Kant's way of founding morality?<br />- Remind me.<br />- Being moral is doing what we all, if we were rational, would agree to do.<br />- And why should we care to follow that rule?<br />- Because we want to more than anything else. Do you know why we want to? (This is not Kant anymore.) Because it places us, in relation to our fellow human beings, in the same relation we are to ourselves in consciousness.<br />- Again, explain.<br />- I'm not sure how much I can. You take over.<br />- You assume I agree with you.<br />- You do. <br />- When, knowers of the field, we're detached from desires impelling us to action, the world we see is beautiful, people's action good, statements true; such a world is like the universality of reason in moral judgment that is able to include everyone in its overview. Even in periods like the year I'm coming out of all can be brought together, even if it is related and included only by noting the love that conspicuously was lacking.<br />- Everything is brought together, seen under the sign of eternity.<br />- And that is where consciousness goes, when it lessens in degree? Into eternity?<br />- It comes from nowhere at the beginning of life and goes to nowhere at the end; why not travels also in the middle?<br />- Are there places of return in nowhere, and other places of no way back?<br />- 'Places in nowhere!'<br />- A strange combination of words, but maybe not stranger than the statement we can conclude with: that we are most ourselves when are in agreement with all. <br /><br />Further Reading:<br /><a href="http://rextyranny.blogspot.com.es/2017/12/consciousness-science-perception.html">Consciousness, Science, Perception</a></div>Rex Millerhttps://plus.google.com/110577386864036108962noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3300118830951645356.post-5217929647791138222017-12-23T23:27:00.000-08:002018-01-13T07:42:28.109-08:00Romantic Lives<a class="image" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Goethe_(Stieler_1828).jpg" style="background: none rgb(248, 249, 250); color: #0b0080; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 12.32px; text-align: center;"><img alt="Goethe (Stieler 1828).jpg" data-file-height="2432" data-file-width="1972" height="200" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/0e/Goethe_%28Stieler_1828%29.jpg/220px-Goethe_%28Stieler_1828%29.jpg" srcset="//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/0e/Goethe_%28Stieler_1828%29.jpg/330px-Goethe_%28Stieler_1828%29.jpg 1.5x, //upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/0e/Goethe_%28Stieler_1828%29.jpg/440px-Goethe_%28Stieler_1828%29.jpg 2x" style="border: 0px; vertical-align: middle;" width="162" /></a><br /><br />- Correct me if I'm wrong, but we both really like the novel <i>Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship</i>,* despite not liking, or rather, not being interested in its author.<br />- Go on.<br />- Wilhelm believes in the romantic life of following desire and chance where they lead. To more responsible parties that involves treating unexamined desires as necessity, and letting chance lead you into radical improvidence, into failure to secure the minimum practical necessities of life.<br />- 'For if we do not know our environment, we shall mistake our dreams for a part of it, and so spoil our science by making it fantastic, and our dreams by making them obligatory.' **<br />- Interesting quote, but I don't want to go in that direction. Wilhelm's problem is not reality, or even fantasy.<br />- What is Wilhelm's problem?<br />- Whether there can be an art to life, whether life as a whole can be a work of art.<br />- In his other works Goethe suggests instead that life is a matter of will, of reiterated and left behind bouts of creativity.<br />- But in this novel things are more complex. The argument is made that a secure foundation, a family, or a patron, or a society of friends, is required to take care of necessities whereupon chance can be followed, and become the basis of creative response, whether in life or in art. Wilhelm's actress-mistress assumes such a necessity of secure foundation, understands the insecurity of Wilhelm's intended life in the theater, and at the end of the novel it is revealed that at least partly the romantic sequence of supposed chance events has been a secret society's show produced to educate Wilhelm.<br />- Educate him to the importance of security upon which rely episodes of creative response to life, with life not having meaning as a whole.<br />- Except that what is so wonderful about the novel is that it gives exactly the opposite impression, of the romantic life of chance having meaning. Wilhelm is, unbeknownst to him, living within a show put on by secret friends, but he, within that show, acquires for himself an adoptive family, a boy and a girl.<br />- Creativity is not just in responding to chance, but in choosing the conditions of necessity. The society of friends adopt him, he adopts the children.<br />- Yes. What do you think?<br />- I'm thinking.<br />- The question hits close to home.<br />- In my experience, in finding the chosen foundation in the midst of romance, and so solving the problem of arbitrariness of chance, practical necessity is neglected and the whole falls apart.<br />- Where does that leave us?<br />- In great difficulty. Wilhelm explains to busnessman Werther: 'How immensely, dear friend, do you err in believing that a work, the first presentation of which is to fill the whole soul, can be produced in broken hours scraped together from other extraneous employment. No: the poet must live wholly for himself, wholly in the objects that delight him. Heaven has furnished him internally with precious gifts; he carries in his bosom a treasure that is ever of itself increasing; he must also live with this treasure, undisturbed from without, in that still blessedness which the rich seek in vain to purchase with their accumulated stores.' A family or patron must be found to take care of practical necessity, on which basis you can seek your own chosen family, in relation to, love and care for which, your episodic creative use of chance has its meaning.<br />- Problem solved.<br />- If your problem is writing a novel in which these ideas are explored. If your life as an artist is a series of such willful acts of reiterated creativity.<br />- But that is not the idea in this novel.<br />- No. If your problem is putting these ideas into effect, not merely in art, but in your life, unless you were born to the necessary conditions you have to rely on chance to create them. You must become a romantic against your will.<br />_______________<br /><i>* Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 'Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship'</i><br /><i>** George Santayana, 'Three Philosophical Poets: Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe'</i>Rex Millerhttps://plus.google.com/110577386864036108962noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3300118830951645356.post-81693726042463511192017-12-18T09:54:00.000-08:002017-12-23T23:47:42.167-08:00Romantic Stories<div><img alt="Image result for spiral icon" height="149" src="https://encrypted-tbn2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSh2t7158_a73IHI6GhnaevIQ7XyfuzP8ZdvS11JZLkbj1TPLpM" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.5) 1px 1px 5px; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13.524px; padding: 8px;" width="200" /><br /><br />- You seem to want to say something. Let's hear it.</div>- I was thinking over your little dance about politics in poverty and poverty in politics,* and your making symbols out of the characters you bring in. I think I've discovered something.<br />- What?<br />- The epitome of all symbols of money and politics and their dance with each other is our new president. The stunning surprise of his election is that the American people, hitherto holding to the myth of themselves as being good people, especially good people, could elect someone who was not only obviously bad but extremely bad.<br />- And now you know the why and how of it?<br />- You be the judge. Isn't he unique in all history, in all time and space for all I know, in being famous because he is rich, and rich because he is famous? <br />- Is that true?<br />- I wouldn't bet on the all history part, but yes, I think it's true. Rich because famous: most of his money comes from his much watched performances on TV shows and renting out his name to buildings he doesn't own. Famous because rich: the part he plays on his TV show and the message of his name is being famously rich. What do you think?<br />- You've got something there.<br />- Then I'd like you to explain a little more about symbols, the culprit in this perverse dance of politics and money.<br />- This particular dance is not hard to explain. Both fame and money are quantifiable symbols of power of social role: the more dollars, the more people who know about you, the more your role can be assumed, on general principles, to be powerful, the greater the guarantee of&nbsp; your safety against the isolation and destitution that is always a danger to people who's security depends on the complementary role play of others.<br />- Fame, because it is a form of security, is worth money, and a quantity of money, another form of security, easily can attract to itself fame.<br />- Yes. Can I tell you a story about money, about symbols? Something that happened on the afternoon of the day I spoke of last time.<br />- Sure.<br /><div>- I was riding my bike through the back streets of Beverly Hills, on my way to Westwood. I turned down the street just behind the Peninsula Hotel...</div><div>- Where the guy worked who stole your last bike.**</div><div>- And where the movie producer in our latest scandal used to summon actresses for "meetings" in which he presented himself to them naked.</div><div>- And when his requested sexual favors were resisted would whine, 'You don't like me because I'm fat!'<br />- Another symbol of our times.</div><div>- Yes. A movie producer, rich, famous, with bad character, but not rendered invulnerable by that unique dance of fame and money of our president. So, I was turning the corner when I spy on the pavement, exactly in the middle of the intersection, a five dollar bill neatly folded in half. I stop, looking out for traffic, and pocket the bill. I glance around for where it could have come from, and now see other bills blowing in the breeze across the intersection. I pick these up too.</div><div>- How much money are we talking about?</div><div>- A ten, and a few ones. I'm ready to mount my bike and go when a large SUV pulls up in front of me. A guy leans out the passenger window, a Mexican-American in his twenties, and says, 'I threw the money out the window.' I ask:</div><blockquote class="tr_bq">- Why'd you do that?<br />- I'm an idiot I guess.<br />- You want me to give you the money?</blockquote><div>He nods. I realize he might have said, which is more probable, 'The money flew out the window'. The bills might be his tips working as a parking valet at the hotel. Or maybe this is the trick that had been tried on me in Budapest. A man walking down the street in front of you leans down and picks up a wallet. You stop to watch as he opens it, disclosing a set of identification cards and a large amount of money. He notes your attention, says to you he doesn't want the trouble of returning the wallet to its owner. Would you like to have it? - only he'd like a finders fee before turning it over. If you pay, or even if you don't, after the man leaves another appears, flashes what appears to be a genuine police badge and accuses you of conspiring to steal the money in the wallet, and then suggests a bribe for his, just this one time, letting the whole thing go.</div><div>- You gave the guy in the car the money. The symbolism isn't clear here.</div><div>- We have promising elements - loose money, a famous hotel - but the story doesn't appear to mean anything. In Goethe's <i>Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship</i> a distinction is drawn between lives given up to fate, and those given up to chance. Those who bet on fate know what things in the world they want and actively pursue them. Those betting on chance know it is not arrangements in the world they have their heart set on; they let the world lead them where it will. Here's a passage from the novel:</div><div><blockquote class="tr_bq">Spring had come in all its brilliancy; storm that had been lowering all day went fiercely down upon the hills; the rain drew back into the country; the sun came forth in all its splendor, and upon the dark vapor rose the lordly rainbow. Wilhelm was riding towards it: the sight made him sad. "Ah!" said he within himself, "must it be that the fairest hues of life appear to us only on a ground of black? And must drops fall, if we are to be enraptured? A bright day is like a dull day, if we look at it unmoved; and what can move us but some silent hope that the inborn inclination of our soul shall not always be without an object? The recital of a noble action moves us; the sight of every thing harmonious moves us: we feel then as if we were not altogether in a foreign land; we fancy we are nearer the home towards which our best and inmost wishes impatiently strive.</blockquote>Symbols have their place in tragic stories: stories of people whose role play blinds them to danger. They make mistakes and suffer from them. Their predictably repetitive action playing a role creates their fate. The romantic character, like Goethe's Wilhelm, however, doesn't follow the tragic form of action but the epic: a series of episodes of danger and escape, each themselves of no meaning: they lead back home, the ultimate place of value.<br /><br />Further Reading:<br /><a href="http://rextyranny.blogspot.com.es/2017/12/romantic-life.html">Romantic Lives</a><br />_______________________<br /><i>* <a href="http://rextyranny.blogspot.com.es/2017/12/before-departure.html">Departure</a></i><br /><i>** <a href="http://rextyranny.blogspot.com.es/2016/12/a-bike-in-trumpland_1.html">A Bike In Trumpland</a></i></div>Rex Millerhttps://plus.google.com/110577386864036108962noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3300118830951645356.post-48844622793803425632017-12-16T15:01:00.000-08:002018-02-02T10:46:38.688-08:00Departure<img alt="Image result for businessman icon" height="200" src="https://encrypted-tbn1.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSr2AYq-8uGlv7Bf7yvVCji2_DieAx95hTd-_pi4VrKOLEQOf-hvtEAHLM" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.5) 1px 1px 5px; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13.524px; padding: 8px;" width="85" /><br /><br />- So you got out. <br />- Finally. For a while.<br />- Tell me about it.<br />- What's there to tell?<br />- How you got out.<br />- A friend in Europe arranged the place, money in the bank from the Hungarian Memory Book paid. Or is that not what you asked for?<br />- It's not.<br />- If I wasn't too particular about where I was going, I knew what I was leaving: politics and poverty. Politics turned into a tool of deepening poverty and poverty imbued with politics. They followed me to the very shuttle bus to the airport from the long term parking where the city buses stop. Last minute errands had been successfully accomplished: spare suit jacket from the cleaners and pair of new jeans from the consignment shop picked up from where they'd been for months; a light, second-hand computer bought for travelling, my ten year old eight pound IBM laptop and my bike left with the Guru,* the half crazy religious Jew in Beverly Hills I stayed with shortly after my 2014 return from Europe.<br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div>- And the politics and poverty?<br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div>- Before I could climb onto the shuttle bus an old woman with two huge new suitcases recruits me to help her drag them up the doorway steps. I do what she asks, and as the bus jerks into motion she proceeds to explain herself: the suitcases are filled with gifts for the destitute, she was staying at the Marriot (hundreds of dollars a night: note the woman's ragged clothes, unhealthy pallor, disheveled hair). She'll change shuttles at the airport for one that will drop her there. She's retired, was a publisher of guide books. In fact, she invented Facebook, tried to fight them for her rights and the banks too, Wells Fargo and Chase, who stole other ideas from her. But had to give up. She questions me when I don't respond: what do I do? where am I going? I confess I've a hard time explaining myself. Barcelona is where I'm going. Why? Also difficult to say. Interesting things are happening there. The state of Catalonia is in a fight with the national government for independence. In the Catalans desire for separation nationalism is mixed up with liberalism.** Here the girl of college age sitting next to me breaks in:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">- I hate that people think that Catalonia is liberal. It's not! The government is authoritarian.<br />- Are you from Catalonia?<br />- Yes.<br />- Thanks for the information. I don't know anything about the Catalan government. I'd assumed that the people of the 1935 anarchist revolution and the election of the present mayor were liberal. The mayor is very liberal, right? A campaigner to stop evictions?<br />- She is. I'm obsessed with her.<br />- I assumed that, whether or not the present government is conservative, an independent Catalonia would be a place where liberalism would more likely flourish? Is that not right?</blockquote><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div>The old woman cuts off the girl's answer, wanting geographical and statistical data. Did you catch the symbolism? On the one side, the assumption that politics was governments, rather than the people governments presently are engaged in impoverishing. On the other side, poverty that has accepted that the marketplace takes away personal responsibility for others and consequently the only public life can be that of social role and social status.<br />- And when you're so poor you have no real social status it has to be imagined. The poor of L.A., you think, ought to have their character free from politics, as at least historically the people of Catalonia have.<br /><br />Further Reading:<br /><a href="http://rextyranny.blogspot.com/2018/02/the-situation-in-catalonia.html">The Situation In Catalonia</a><br /><a href="http://rextyranny.blogspot.com.es/2017/12/romantic-stories.html">Romantic Stories</a><br />_________________________<br /><i>* <a href="http://rextyranny.blogspot.com.es/2014/09/a-spiritual-life.html">At The Spiritual Film Festival</a></i><br />*<i>* "For example, the Spanish constitutional court annulled Catalan Parliament policies including a guaranteed basic income, poverty reduction measures, a tax on nuclear waste and sugarised beverages. More recently, Madrid imposed punitive restrictions on the right of the City of Barcelona to use its budget surplus carry out social projects, and prohibited the housing of refugees in facilities that the City had built for that purpose." (Yanis Varoufakis, DiEM25)</i>Rex Millerhttps://plus.google.com/110577386864036108962noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3300118830951645356.post-58841971914792820002017-12-02T06:02:00.002-08:002017-12-12T11:35:13.624-08:00Utopias of Love<img height="131" src="https://laradunning.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/paris-cafe-night.jpg" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.5) 1px 1px 5px; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13.524px; padding: 8px;" width="200" /><br /><br />- Why did you send me the story? <i>The</i>&nbsp;<i>Dream of a Ridiculous Man?*</i>&nbsp;I read it, though I'd read it long ago, in school I think.<br />- And?<br />- It's wonderful, at first reading and now. Under your influence I found myself sketching out the philosophic argument Dostoevsky makes. The title character, though poor, has home and job. He calls himself a ridiculous man because he knows how unlikely he is to be loved as he feels he loves, even in his isolation, strangers and places that have become familiar to him on his walks. In the seasonal emptying of Saint Petersburg, when the familiar strangers have gone with most of the rest of the population, his ridiculousness is brought home to him. The routines of politeness and duties of work rule out the individual attention love requires. He resolves to kill himself, and when the day comes when he feels himself ready a young girl grabs hold of him in the street, crying out, 'Mama! Mama!' - Her mother needs help! He shakes her off, not seeing why if all life is meaningless this demand for help should be any exception to the meaninglessness. That night he has a dream of a world where everyone loves and is loved. As some argue that the fact of our having the idea of god proves his reality, so this dream is so detailed that when he wakes it seems to carry with it its own proof of the possibility of its utopian society. The continuation of the dream convinces him even more of the real possibility of such a society. For what happens is his arrival with his own faults corrupts the perfect society. The once innocent people tell him they are happy with their corruption. Whereas before they had been happy in their simple lives, they began to speculate on the best life. Holders of different views begin to murder each other as obstacles to progress. This was acceptable, for to them, knowledge of life was a superior substitute for the experience of life. The ridiculous man disagrees. The experience of life is more important than knowledge of it. The perfect society has no need to await perfect knowledge of life to arrive, it's possible to begin love of all for all at any moment, no need to wait for history to resolve all conflicts; love is the past restored.<br />- All you need is love. Your philosophic commentary?<br />- You need more than love. Knowledge of life is not what is required, but rather knowledge of death, of what kills our love. That is what needs to be the possession of all in order for all to love all.<br />- The ridiculous man in his new specialization, a talker of utopia, remains ridiculous.<br />- He would be if he remained only a talker, relying on hope. Instead he begins to correct his mistakes: he seeks out the child that asked help and helps her. He knows with all his talk of love he is still thought to be ridiculous, but he no longer considers himself so. It's a great story.<br />- Yes.<br />- So why have me read it?<br />- Los Angeles to me is like St. Petersberg to the ridiculous man. Like him I&nbsp; have no meaningful contact with anyone, and like him this city I live in is a place I have strong feelings for. Mostly a couple neighborhoods, three or four cafes, the university research library. My relations to people are strictly business, trivial business at that. And like in Dostoevsky's story my last few days had found me feeling down, valuing at nothing everything in my life; and like in the story at this low point in my life a girl appears needing my help, and I refuse.<br />- And you now want to tell me your story.<br />- Yes. You've heard a lot from me about the cafe I go to in West Hollywood. Sitting on the terrace, about an hour after closing time, they pass in succession, one by one, the drug addicts, the street sleepers, these who hear voices, those who talk to themselves. Across the street at the bus stop is as usual the old fellow bedded down for the night, shouting in his sleep, waking up suddenly, swearing, then quickly falling back asleep. The past week, every morning at two, closing time for the bars up the street, this little African man comes and sits down next to me. With painfully fake cheerfulness he asks me, 'How's it going today?' to which, not wanting to encourage him, I never respond. From the beginning he's struck me as false. Usually he goes away. Last night he stayed, reading a book in Arabic, guiding his eyes with a forefinger, and laughing softly, 'Hee Hee Hee', 'Hee Hee Hee'. A ride service car stops across the street, dropping off a young, nicely dressed girl about twenty years old. She stands uncertainly at the curb on her high heel platform shoes, apparently attracted by the lights of the cafe, crosses the street to stand unsteadily again at the curb. The little African man looks up and notices her. He shouts out his, 'How you're doing tonight?' When she doesn't answer he goes up to her, asks her how she is, can he help her, where is she going? To all of which she doesn't say a word. Do you want to sit down? he asks. No answer. He takes her arm and guides her to the bench at the cafe window. I listen as he delivers a speech to her: Everybody has problems some time. He's going to help her, that's normal. Does she have a key? Where does she live? Does she have a key? Going by the bags he carries, and the bits of twigs and leaves on his jacket, the little African beds down in one of the nearby doorways. If a pretty girl has a place somewhere he could join her that be a big improvement.<br />- Are you still pursuing the comparison? If you are a modern day ridiculous man the little African has become a sort of narrator of the dream of utopia.<br />- Yes. I'd just reread the story myself, and the perversity of the situation was borne down on me. I watched and listened to the little African. I'm immobilized, fascinated. The girl is on drugs. She doesn't know where she is or know that is something good for her to know, alone in West Hollywood at two in the morning. Several times, at a break in the little African's cajoling, she repeats, 'How are you?' To which question the African giggles, 'Hee Hee Hee'.&nbsp; Finally he takes her arm again saying he'll walk her home and they start together across the street. I know I ought to stop this. But as I said, I'm immobilized. Like the ridiculous man in the story, the world has become meaningless to me. Why should I act as if there was something meaningful, necessary to be done, like helping a girl? How would that be consistent and rational? I look on in great tension. I've had experience in the past here with people showing up on drugs asking me to tell them where they are: two experiences precisely, both young men, and both, upon seeing a ride service car approach suddenly ran off, got in and drove away, having remembered a destination to tell the driver. This corner, a popular pick up and drop off spot for rides services, I'm thinking has a mystic attraction for those on drugs who can't remember where they are. If I'm right, the girl will return. I watch as their figures get smaller and smaller, and then: Yes! She has shrugged off the grip of the little African and is coming back. The little African trails behind, bags on his shoulders. At the cafe he says he'll return in a minute and takes off. I sit down by the girl, ask if she'll let me take her to Cedar Sinai Hospital, five minutes away. Or, I ask her, maybe she'd like to stay here until the cafe opens, if she has nowhere else to go. She makes no response. Ridiculous man that I am, I'm aware that when not on drugs she would ignore me just the same as she is doing now. I watch her closely, my whole body tensed in attention. I want to help her but I won't let myself. The African returns, laughs 'Hee Hee Hee', again shoulders his bags, takes her arm and starts her out on another walk. A service car drives up, the girl rushes over; with some difficulty she opens the passenger door and gets in, followed by the little African. The service car drives off, stops at the beginning of the next block, ejecting the little African with his bags in his hands.<br />- That's the whole story?<br />- Yes. Maybe, since you've described Dostoevsky's story so well, you could tell me how I failed to live up to the level of his ridiculous man?<br />- You mean why you froze? Because the girl was part of that little Los Angeles world of yours that had turned unlovable, and she didn't ask for your help.<br />- Why should my help wait on being asked?<br />- Because acting merely by rule to create a utopia of love is nevertheless to be acting without love.<br />- And all it would take to recover love was to be asked for help?<br />- It's your feelings were talking about. You tell me.<br />- That's all it would take.<br />___________________<br />* <i><a href="https://www.colorado.edu/studentgroups/shortfiction/RidiculousMan.pdf">The Dream of a Ridiculous Man</a>,&nbsp;Fyodor Dostoyevsky</i>Rex Millerhttps://plus.google.com/110577386864036108962noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3300118830951645356.post-42663294764982373122017-11-27T07:45:00.000-08:002017-12-01T06:05:26.708-08:00Leaders Who Betray<img height="149" src="https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTxK8WqTEJj1O4F-DLyiGqYF5zUzKgmImayGjsS4WDjYtzBuw03" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.5) 1px 1px 5px; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13.524px; padding: 8px;" width="200" /><br /><br />- I get the impression many of your ideas you make up as we go along. Am I right?<br />- You're right.<br />- So you won't be offended by my saying that often your ideas could be clearer.<br />- Do you have any particular ideas in mind?<br />- I have a particular problem in mind, one we've already talked about which I think many of your other ideas might help us solve.<br />- If they were clearer.<br />- Yes.<br />- And what problem is that?<br />- Why political leaders, the ones with the best ideas, betray the people who elect them. It seems that they don't do it out of self interest, not directly, but rather they do it to serve the interest of their class - the class of leaders. But why do they do this? Wait, don't answer. First I'd like to gather together what you've said in the past. You've said leaders who betray have been educated to follow rules they haven't learned or confirmed by their own experience.* Science, laws relating classes of things with classes of things, isn't good enough for leaders. They need the individual experiment with ideas philosophy provides. Correct?<br />- Yes.<br />- You found a model for this in the&nbsp;<i>Genesis </i>story<i>&nbsp;</i>of the expulsion from Eden. Adam is condemned to agriculture, to work the land with pain. Agriculture is repetitive, thus rule guided, compared to the free wandering of a shepherd. God favors the sacrifice of the shepherd Abel over that of the land-working Cain.** You cite, from&nbsp;<i>Ezekiel 34,</i>*** King David watching over stray sheep as a model for self government in society: every individual is responsible for bringing back those in their community who stray. A leader can behave like a shepherd or a farmer: to be rule guided in harvesting votes, or genuinely concerned with saving those at risk. Leaders have to know how we go wrong, and to be able to teach others to recognize this in time to stop it from happening. Leaders have to understand that democracy is sharing of power between equals in power. Equality in power comes from economic independence. Having place to live and food to eat allows discussion of how life might best develop from there to go on without fear and resentment. Prostitution shows how political power is not identical to social power. The security of home which is the basis of political equality is lost when the prostitute exchanges control over her body for the freedom represented by a sum of money.**** Politicians who gain their position by compromise are a kind of prostitute: acting by rule guiding choice which compromises to accept, which to reject, they are agriculturalists, are incapable of the power arising from the self determination of democracy. They do however share power with other leaders who they enact their compromises with, and their loyalty is to them rather than to the people as a whole. Loyalty to social class arises like the belief of the buyer of a prostitute that he acquires the prostitute's beauty and admiration in exchange for his money.*****<br />- I said all that?<br />- You know you did. Prostitution, agriculture, leaders as class, science vs. philosophy, rules coming out of social practice vs. individual practice. We can't trust leaders who prostitute themselves by making a principle to always compromise, who "harvest" votes rather than shepherd people, who've learned "scientific" rules of compromise by a life in politics, who lack diverse experience outside of institutions.<br />- And you'd like me to clarify all this?<br />- If you can.<br />- Let's talk about it further, now really I can't, except maybe add what to look for in a untrustworthy leader. Leaders might say all the right things, might even say what we say here. But look to the company they keep. Democracy, remember, is founded on bodily freedom.****** The democrat in his body desires, likes the company of other democrats; their public habits are in accord. Don't trust a Bernie Sanders who throws his arm around his supposed opponent Hilary Clinton. Don't trust the ex-Greek finance minister, now founder of the European <i>Diem</i> party Yanis Varoufakis who took as advisers influential neo-liberal economists who agreed with him that their operating principles were inapplicable,******* who nevertheless insisted the ruling myth of the leadership class must be compromised with for the sake of retaining power and having an opportunity to accomplish anything at all.<br />______________<br />* <i><a href="http://rextyranny.blogspot.com/2017/07/politicians-playing-games.html">Philosophy &amp; Science of Betrayal</a></i><br />** <i><a href="http://rextyranny.blogspot.co.il/2012/06/abel-is-more-able.html">Abel Is More Able</a>&nbsp;</i><i>&nbsp;</i><br /><i><a href="http://rextyranny.blogspot.co.il/2011/07/eve.html">Eve In The Garden Of Eden</a></i><br />***&nbsp;<i><a href="http://rextyranny.blogspot.com/2015/09/bringing-back-stray-sheep.html">Bringing Back Stray Sheep</a></i><br /><div>****&nbsp;<i><a href="http://rextyranny.blogspot.com/2014/06/prostitution-employment-slavery.html">Prostitution, Employment, Slavery</a>,&nbsp;</i><br /><i>*****&nbsp;<a href="http://rextyranny.blogspot.com/2014/07/slavery-beverly-hills.html">Slavery On A Walk In Beverly Hills</a></i><br />****** <i><a href="http://rextyranny.blogspot.com/2016/01/prostitution-torture.html">Prostitution &amp; Torture</a></i><br />*******&nbsp;<i><a href="http://rextyranny.blogspot.com/2016/07/spectacle-gods.html">Spectacle &amp; God</a>&nbsp;</i><br />&nbsp;<i><a href="http://rextyranny.blogspot.com/2017/08/believe-it-or-not.html">Believe It Or Not</a></i></div>Rex Millerhttps://plus.google.com/110577386864036108962noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3300118830951645356.post-78823802240283926482017-11-11T19:53:00.003-08:002017-11-15T18:22:22.182-08:00Real Democracy<i style="background-color: #c0a154; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;"><img class="rg_i" data-sz="f" height="236" name="hUyeIgj0Gb4LJM:" src="https://encrypted-tbn2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcS9CARkMZ826Czfz4UcLshr-UOwperolDgwVoP-yWazLtgBsgvq" style="background: white; box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.498) 1px 1px 5px; height: 148px; margin-left: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding: 8px; width: 200px;" width="320" />&nbsp;</i><br /><br />- A new book purports to answer the question why the U.S. government hasn't prosecuted any bank executive for the crimes leading to the 2008 economic collapse. Have you seen it?<br />- <i>The Chicken-Shit Club</i>.<br />- Yes. It's argument is that these financial crimes are hard to prove in court, and U.S. prosecutors are proud of their near 100% win record thanks to their never prosecuting cases with uncertain outcomes, to their choosing to settle out of court instead.<br />- And what do you think of that argument?<br />- It's essentially the same line taken by president at the time Obama who offered the excuse it wasn't&nbsp;clear that a crime has been committed, obviously untrue.<br />- Why?<br />- What could be a clearer case of fraud than Goldman-Sachs telling customers to buy what they themselves were at the same time ridding themselves of as quickly as possible? Or Wells Fargo opening without permission <i>millions</i> of fraudulent accounts in the names of their customers? A few years ago a federal court judge, writing in the New York Review of Books*, said there was no doubt that&nbsp;crimes had been committed, but prosecutors didn't prosecute corporate executives because they were not in the habit of prosecuting corporate executives: it just wasn't done.<br />- Prosecutors were afraid of losing if they prosecuted the corporations themselves, and they didn't want to prosecute corporate executives because that 'just wasn't something they do'.<br />- Yes. The same impunity of corporations and executives can be seen in the lack of prosecution of banks and their executives for creating <i>millions </i>of fraudulent deeds to property they now wanted to sell that they'd bought as a package without deeds, the actual practice that led up to the financial collapse of 2008. Banks<i> </i>to this very day<i>**</i> continue to produce fraudulent documents as they sell off their accumulated foreclosed properties from the collapse.<br />- A more convincing explanation is that&nbsp;many of the government prosecutors would within a few years be working at vastly greater salary for the executives and companies they made favorable out-of-court deals with.<br />- I agree. We're not seeing the result of inefficiency of professional practice but justice being bought out; outright corruption dressed up as business as usual.<br />- What did you want to ask me about?<br />- I had just gotten used to the idea we don't live in much of a democracy because virtually all elected officials had been bought out by corporate "donations". That wasn't so bad, because the government though a lot isn't everything. Everyday life goes on. But now we see the finance industry, the largest industry in the country, in addition to buying the government, under the protection of the government they've bought is waging direct war on the people of the country. Yet life goes on as if everyone is doing the job they claim they are doing, the government watching out for the people and finance helping them out with their money.<br />- Again, what did you want to ask me?<br />- Don't be impatient. I know corruption is nothing new. I wanted to ask you if this&nbsp;is new, the openness of the corruption, and the way life goes on as if nothing much is wrong.<br />- Would you say the feeling of unreality is related to the sense that we are supposed to be living in a democracy yet are not? That we were willing to accept that our vote didn't count if somehow something was left of democracy in the way people lived together? And that the corporations getting away with literally<i> millions</i> of crimes against their customers challenges the sense that everyday life can be going on as usual?<br />- Yes. Democracy isn't rule of the many, or rule of the poor; it's a deal made by the poor with the rich that the rich wouldn't rob too much and in exchange the poor wouldn't take away their property.<br />- And that deal has been broken, yet we still think we are living in a democracy. Thus our feeling of unreality at being confronted with the fact that the deal between rich and poor has unquestionably been broken.<br />- So what do you think?<br />- We see here in our times how democracy ends, but have you ever wondered how it began?<br />- Where the idea came from to get rid of the property qualification for citizenship?<br />- Yes.<br />- Ancient Athens.<br />- I mean how had the rich convinced themselves the poor wouldn't vote them out of their riches, and how had the poor convinced themselves the rich wouldn't rob them blind?<br />- What did the Athenians themselves say? What about Pericles' funeral oration from Thucydides?<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><i> Our love of what is beautiful does not lead to extravagance; our love of the things of the mind does not make us soft. We regard wealth as something to be properly used, rather than as something to boast about"..."Here each individual is interested not only in his own affairs but in the affairs of the state as well: even those who are mostly occupied with their own business are extremely well-informed on general politics—this is a peculiarity of ours: we do not say that a man who takes no interest in politics is a man who minds his own business; we say that he has no business here at all.</i></blockquote>- Would you agree then that democracy is a theory of political life that is being tested in its actual practice?<br />- What theory?<br />- Self control, and self-knowledge creates a human being that can reach productive agreement with other human beings irrespective of how much property they own. If you think about it, it's really a wild idea. What is it about this character of human being that allows this agreement?<br />- You tell me. The idea really does seem to come out of nowhere. There wasn't, was there, precedent in history before the Athenians came up with it?<br />- There was perhaps a different kind of precedent.<br />- What kind?<br />- The so-called Pre-Socratic philosophers, who made claims about nature that it was all variations in the shape or assemblage of water, or air, or a combination of elements. While we see change in nature, actually, they thought, something was staying the same. Water was always there, or air, or a combination of elements.<br />- I see. Democracy is a theory of political life that says that, produce a human character of the sort that knows itself and controls itself, and something human stays constant in political life, and that constant is what we mean by democracy, not good relation between classes or voting rights. Is that what you mean?<br />- Yes.&nbsp;We live in a country where many or even most have or would like to have democratic character, yet the actual government and economic life no longer are of the kind a people with democratic character should be able to make for themselves. Because we see nature on the same terms as we've been accustomed to see political life, the unchanging behind the changing, our political life which no longer has that form strikes us as "unreal".<br /><br />Further Reading:<br /><a href="http://rextyranny.blogspot.com/2017/01/its-not-real.html">It's Not Real</a><br />_____________________<br /><i>*&nbsp;<span id="goog_1459463939"></span><span id="goog_1459463940"></span><a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2014/01/09/financial-crisis-why-no-executive-prosecutions/">The Financial Crisis: Why Have No High-Level Executives Been Prosecuted?</a></i><br />** <i><a href="http://thenewpress.com/books/chain-of-title">Chain of Title</a></i>Rex Millerhttps://plus.google.com/110577386864036108962noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3300118830951645356.post-86530777059712601082017-10-26T18:56:00.001-07:002017-10-29T20:51:22.283-07:00The Social Drug<a class="irc_mil i3597 iEQvhylbgA0s-zixyDjKkw5M" data-href="https://www.pinterest.com/pin/296393219217540662/" data-noload="" data-ved="0ahUKEwj1zODq2I_XAhUY6mMKHdV5B6gQjRwIBw" href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&amp;rct=j&amp;q=&amp;esrc=s&amp;source=images&amp;cd=&amp;ved=0ahUKEwj1zODq2I_XAhUY6mMKHdV5B6gQjRwIBw&amp;url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.pinterest.com%2Fpin%2F296393219217540662%2F&amp;psig=AOvVaw1KL242hGT-MCA7AkG8LTcX&amp;ust=1509155551812385" jsaction="mousedown:irc.rl;keydown:irc.rlk" rel="noopener" style="background-color: #222222; border: 0px; color: #660099; cursor: pointer; font-family: Roboto, arial, sans-serif; font-size: small; text-align: center;" tabindex="0" target="_blank"><img alt="Image result for schizophrenia" class="irc_mi" height="198" src="https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/8d/c4/d6/8dc4d613b2976df38dec308c61d3d854.jpg" style="background-color: white; background-image: -webkit-linear-gradient(45deg, rgb(239, 239, 239) 25%, transparent 25%, transparent 75%, rgb(239, 239, 239) 75%, rgb(239, 239, 239)), -webkit-linear-gradient(45deg, rgb(239, 239, 239) 25%, transparent 25%, transparent 75%, rgb(239, 239, 239) 75%, rgb(239, 239, 239)); background-position: 0px 0px, 10px 10px; background-size: 21px 21px; border: 0px; box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.65) 0px 5px 35px; margin-top: 0px;" width="200" /></a><br /><br />- I know. I know. You told me not to talk to you about academics. You'll find this interesting.<br /><div>- Go ahead.</div><div>- A research lab at UCLA, right here in our own backyard, has linked certain failures of social perception in schizophrenics to abnormal activity of their brains.<br />- Failure in social perception caused by abnormal brains, or&nbsp;<i>vice versa?</i><br />- The professors assume without evidence the former, that abnormal brains cause deficient behavior. But that’s not what I want to tell you about. The lab just completed a study of those who answered an Los Angeles Craigslist ad for people who self-identified themselves as socially detached, defined by their not having a single confidante. Schizophrenics, while they have normal or superior ability to share the feelings of others, fail to reason correctly about others, they fail to identify the different situations and point of view of others. The small sample of self identified socially detached&nbsp; had similar failures of social perceptions as schizophrenics, while otherwise not showing the schizophrenic pathology of hearing voices or imagining they live in a fantasy world, displaying scattered or overactive behavior,</div><div>- And the professors imagine treating this normal but detached group with drugs or electric shock so that they achieve normal ability to visualize the situation and perspectives of others.<br />- You weren't at this afternoon's lecture. How have you heard of this?<br />- From the lab's 2015 study* on deficient social perception of schizophrenics. This though is the first I've heard of the Craigslist study of social perception deficient “normals”.<br />- Ok. At the end of the lecture I did my own small sample study by approaching the speaker, Doctor of Neuroscience Professor Green, expecting him to detach himself from me, that is, to turn away and refuse to answer my question.<br />- What did you ask?<br />- Wasn’t it likely to be true that the normals he had sampled were detached from society not because their mental equipment failed them, but rather because society was bad, was immoral, because it was better for the mental health of the normal to be detached from society?<br />- What did he answer?<br />- That he had to go.<br />- Your point thus being made than a society of people like him who detach themselves from others like you might well be better detached from. Mildly amusing.<br />- Not to Dr. Green. His own fully functioning social perception skills perceive others like me as better to be detached from because of our inferior social perception skills.<br />- Dr. Green thinks you should be given drugs, when they are discovered, or electrics shocks to change your brain activation to normal.<br />- He does.<br />- So?<br />- Don’t you think it is probable that the self-identified detached people show less understanding of others' situation and perspective because they are not now, and perhaps for a lifetime haven’t been interested? That perhaps their social perception skills are normal, but have been lessened by disuse?<br />- That seems likely.<br />- Then you'll be interested to learn that Dr. Green and his lab has a government grant to study the social perceptual failures of veterans living on the street. It doesn’t occur to Dr. Green that not their brains, but economics, that property relations might have put the veterans in their position. A position of exclusion in which, like you say, they may not be particularly interested in perceiving the psychology of people who have excluded them.<br /><div>- Too bad you didn't say that to him when you had the chance.<br />- But I did.<br />- What was his answer?<br />- He said the veterans had been given places to live while they were being studied.&nbsp;</div><div>- Moron.</div><div>- Indeed. Dr. Green wants to drug the veterans or shock them into a condition people like him can accept without having to turn their backs on. That our government is funding research to find drugs to control not mere mental states but conformity to society, wants to develop a social drug, is not surprising. But what of the way that both the class of socially excluded and the class of socially excluding develop behavior that resembles that of the schizophrenic? That those who would voluntarily detach themselves, whether or not they are also being forcibly detached, do so because they perceive the others to be self-detached, detached from themselves?<br />- Detached from themselves how?<br />- People like the professor adapt to the situation of the moment: they do and say what's required to get from others what they want, what's required by professional or personal advancement. Going this way and that, turning away from this person and accepting that, depending on the demands of others, there is no consistency in their lives. They have no character.<br />- And the detachment of this moment’s self from last moment’s self is a kind of schizophrenia.<br />- Yes. What do you think? Such people show no interest in knowing who they are, perceiving their own situation and point of view. Their desires of the moment, filtered through the demands of others, are perceived as if voices out of nowhere. Likewise their passions appear to come, when they do come, out of nowhere. And their view of society, adapted to the demands of conformity to others, are self-created like a schizophrenic's fantasy. So, you see? The normal of our society, both those that exclude, and those that are excluded, reselmble schizophrenics.<br />- You were right. I like it.</div><div>________________________</div><i>* <a href="http://www.nature.com/nrn/journal/v16/n10/full/nrn4005.html">"Social cognition in schizophrenia"</a>, Green et al., Nature Reviews Neuroscience,&nbsp;September 2015: "...it is entirely possible that future pharmacological treatments or neural-stimulation approaches (such as transcranial direct current stimulation) could be used in a targeted manner to affect a particular social processing system. Ultimately, it is hoped that a better understanding of social cognition and the related neural mechanisms in schizophrenia will enable us to decrease social disability in this complex condition."</i></div>Rex Millerhttps://plus.google.com/110577386864036108962noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3300118830951645356.post-56139879748714466142017-09-18T11:23:00.000-07:002017-12-31T04:39:39.422-08:00There Is An Alternative<a class="_hes" href="https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=https%3A%2F%2Fd30y9cdsu7xlg0.cloudfront.net%2Fpng%2F22904-200.png&amp;imgrefurl=https%3A%2F%2Fthenounproject.com%2Fterm%2Fhealth-insurance-marketplace%2F22904%2F&amp;docid=1oIqzO3k24nLIM&amp;tbnid=pu5d3irACcHZMM%3A&amp;vet=1&amp;w=200&amp;h=200&amp;bih=678&amp;biw=1366&amp;ved=0ahUKEwjCz7Wkra_WAhVmy1QKHTOrBVMQMwiyASgAMAA&amp;iact=c&amp;ictx=1" style="color: #660099; cursor: pointer; font-family: Roboto, arial, sans-serif; font-size: small; height: auto; width: auto;" tabindex="0"><img alt="Related image" class="target_image irc_rii" src="https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcS1eTjuDLRc2DxHA3U5sPPYAvYRIniCYi6QmAFuH7lQC3vP_r_Q0A" style="height: 80px; margin-top: 0px; opacity: 0.8; width: 80px;" /></a><br /><br />- Who was it that first said, 'There Is No Alternative To Capitalism?'<br />- Margaret Thatcher?<br />- Would you agree that behind this claim is a belief that we are never going to form a community that will do without enmity? A belief that there is a limit to our cooperation. Market exchange began in primitive communities exclusively between tribal enemies. Not matter our progress and technology we are never going to get past having enemies. The limited truce of the market we can, it seems, more or less successfully observe, at least in some times and some places.<br />- I think that is a fair conclusion.<br />- Now our market exchanges done between enemies are done always under regulation, the agreement of enemies to a truce and certain procedures of making trades. Do you agree?<br />- Yes.<br />- What is agreed to under the truce is how, and when, the trade is done. But not what is traded?<br />- Yes.<br />- But if it were the opposite? If the rules of the truce decided what is good to be traded, but left the how and when pretty much open to the enemies?<br />- How would that work?<br />- Imagine a multitude of companies competing with each other to make and sell products, but in every company the government has a controlling interest to make sure things are not produced that are the not the right kind of things.<br />- What are the right kind of things?<br />- Those that provide people with necessities like food and shelter and clean environment. Perhaps the government would by law provide these to all, and allow individuals, now no longer living in fear, to compete for the satisfactions of learning and pleasing others and of creativity itself. The more successful companies would give more creative opportunity to participants and that would be their reward for successful competition.<br />- Seems utopian to me. Will people accustomed to treating each other as enemies agree to what should be traded?<br />- Do they presently agree to the how and when?<br />- They don't. Who made the agreement that trade and thinking about trade should be constant, 24 hours a day?*<br />- We're born into the agreement.<br />- We are. So here is the question: Is there then an obvious alternative? Can people arrange the exchange between truce management and the market? Can people decide to give into the control of the government the 'what' to produce, and leave to the market the 'how' and 'when'?<br />- I don't see why not. It's just one more trade.<br /><br />Further Reading:<br /><a href="http://rextyranny.blogspot.com/2015/02/property.html">Property</a><br />___________________________<br /><i>* ...and not other relations between people such as play, generosity, creativity, love.</i>Rex Millerhttps://plus.google.com/110577386864036108962noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3300118830951645356.post-42935591080049630952017-09-05T14:42:00.001-07:002017-09-29T15:20:44.008-07:00Past The End Of History&nbsp;&nbsp;<a class="_hes" href="https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.pakistantribe.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2014%2F05%2FKiller-icon.gif&amp;imgrefurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.pakistantribe.com%2F16162%2Fuk-agencies-trace-killers-of-dr-imran-farooq%2Fkiller-icon-2&amp;docid=NPBBoO0reH_hBM&amp;tbnid=tYiZmbFLT3vTIM%3A&amp;vet=1&amp;w=640&amp;h=512&amp;itg=1&amp;bih=468&amp;biw=853&amp;ved=0ahUKEwibiYyh_I3WAhXCKGMKHZTAB9oQMwhqKAAwAA&amp;iact=c&amp;ictx=1" style="color: #660099; cursor: pointer; font-family: Roboto, arial, sans-serif; font-size: small; height: auto; width: auto;"><img alt="Related image" class="target_image irc_rii" src="https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcS_lp9xu8-I8kKnycOyLQTntA4ig57-XsuXhhceX7EMBKvAUs7OTw" style="height: 80px; margin-left: -10px; margin-top: 0px; opacity: 0.8; width: 100px;" /></a><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><i>What a beautiful world this will be, what a glorious time to be free.*</i></blockquote>- Yesterday I woke suddenly from dozing off at my computer. I was outside at Starbuck's and this woman was sitting on the bench near me swearing and screaming at me while pounding a steel pipe on the metal table. She'd been threatening my life while I slept. This woman was one of the after closing time regulars, had been coming for years. At first she'll talk to you calmly. Within a minute she's telling you about who's spying on her and she's going to sue, within another minute she's taken offense somehow at something you said or because you didn't say anything and off she goes into her swearing and screaming. She does this with everyone. She calls the police and shouts at them too. She admits to have gone so far as smashing up stranger's windshield when communications were shared between cars in stalled traffic. It's in the courts now.<br />- You're making this up.<br />- No, believe me. Have I ever mentioned to you the four fraternity boys? A couple months back they got out of car and launched a volley of raw eggs at my face. One commented: 'I bet you didn't expect that'. Then they calmly got back in their car and drove away. Around this same time of night, two weeks ago now, a tall black man in his 20's approached my table, bent his head down to within an inch of mine and gave me the message that the race war is starting and it was starting with me. I would be the first victim. I created some doubt in his mind that he'd stumbled upon the only non-racist in the neighborhood long enough to grab my computer and slip away. About a month before this appearance, I'm sitting back at the same table when a middle aged man, unusually well dressed for time and place rattles the locked Starbucks door then steps over to me and asks:<br /><div><blockquote class="tr_bq">- What are you doing sitting out here late at night? You shouldn't be here. What happened to you?<br />- Just luck. Doesn't mean anything. What brings you here?<br />- Where am I?<br />- You're in West Hollywood. At the border of Beverly Hills. Those were Beverly Hills police you were taunting.<br />- F^%&amp;#^*ing police. Why are they harassing you and me, a couple of white guys?<br />- Are they harassing me?<br />- They talk bad about you. I say you're a F^%&amp;;#^*ing genius.<br />- I get that a lot.<br />- You look good.<br />- I do? I don't see how. Where are you from?<br />- Buffalo.<br />- What have you been doing tonight? Where are you going now?<br />- I'm going to kill someone.<br />- Who?<br />- You maybe.<br />- Why would you want to kill me? What do you do? What is your profession?<br />- I kill people.<br />- Why would you want to kill people?<br />- I eat them. I'll eat your face. What do you say to that?<br />- I don't think it is a good idea. I have things left to do in life.<br />- I love you. You know? You're in danger.<br />- I know.<br />- There's my guy. Take care of yourself.</blockquote>- Really, you're making this up.<br />- Accurately recounted word for word. And then there's the self described addict who told me he probably would take my computer next time he saw me with my eyes closed.** He needed money to buy drugs.</div><div>- What were you reading when you fell asleep?</div><div>- A professor's paper sent my way by the algorithms at Academia.edu.<br />- Was it so boring?<br />- Not at all. In fact, now that I think of it, I see something interesting. The paper was by a philosophy professor at the Central European University in Budapest. That's the university, in case you haven't heard, the neofascist government of Hungary recently passed a law authorizing them to shut down.<br />- You used to hang out there when you lived in Budapest.<br />- I did. Remember how when the Soviet Union collapsed an announcement, widely ridiculed, was made: History Is Over. Capitalism and democracy have triumphed. There is nowhere to go from here. Progress will bring nothing new in economic and political forms. Less than twenty years later we've started to hear almost the opposite: not history, but our history, the history of our politics and economics in the present form seems to be over. We have a fascist in the executive and the economy has developed into a machine used by the rich to rob everyone else.<br />- What was missed back on 1989?<br />- The paper I was reading was about the lectures the French philosopher Michel Foucault's gave on neoliberalism shortly before he died. This was the late 70's. His previous, extremely influential studies were about how power is exercised on people not directly by physical restraint or law, but by limiting how they thought of themselves and were thought of by experts: a kind of governance he called 'biopower'. By the 18th Century government was involving itself in all aspects of life: health, sexuality, sanity. However, it came to be believed&nbsp;&nbsp;in the 19th century that a natural law governed the marketplace and that if the government intervened it could only harm productivity. Foucault saw this as a fortuitous space of freedom from government supervision. The lectures had many critics among his fellow radicals. They were surprised, felt betrayed by his seeming economic conservatism. He had forgotten about class relations, class war: doing without regulation in capitalism meant monopoly, bribery, collusion by the rich undermining the free market. He also was wrong about non-social intervention in personal economic life, as we know to our cost: we sell ourselves, invest in ourselves, identify ourselves in our possessions, work for the sake of success in work not for the beauty and happiness of life.</div><div>- &nbsp;I seem to remember that around the time of these lectures Foucault had made the news with his close observation of the Iranian Revolution. As in neoliberalism's hands-off of economic life Foucault saw room for a personal spiritual revolution, he saw the same hidden in the shadows of a political revolution claiming to inaugurate&nbsp;a national spirituality.</div><div>- And that is an even stranger defection to conservatism because Muslim governments tightly regulate private life.&nbsp;</div><div>- Perhaps he wasn't looking too far past the act of revolution itself. He had the same attitude to spiritual revolution as he had to sexual revolution.<br />- Which was?<br />- The only desirable outcome of revolution for him could be anarchy. He didn't believe in a fixed human nature.<br />- Somehow, though, individuals without fixed nature had a collectively produced nature in which all knowledge was taken into the service of power to be used against the powerless.<br />- That's right. What was there lurking deep down in the history of politics and economics that suddenly revealed itself, proving not history to be at an end but this particular history? Not Foucault's revolutionary spirituality.<br />- No. Hasn't made an appearance.<br />- And desires, shameful or otherwise? Not in the shadows. They have been and are familiar and fundamental to politics and economics. You agree?<br />- Yes.<br />- Then what? Do you know what I think?<br />- What?<br />- How could history be ready to end when there continue to be major, fundamental, unexamined problems?<br />- And they are?<br />- Property and ritual. Or only one problem - property - that shows itself differently in politics and economics.<br />- Go on.<br />- Democracies hold assemblies where citizens share power with each other to make laws. But if citizens delegate authority to representatives, the essential, initial conditions - assembling a crowd, and its perceived weakness - are set for ritual, as the electorate always is in a position of weakness in relation to the government. Ritual:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">1. Starts in a condition of weakness<br />2. Sets in motion a group of people acting together passionately<br />3. Ends in a sense of strength</blockquote></div><div>The 19th century brought neoliberalism and democracy's return to history. The 20th century brought fascism, which we can define as<i>&nbsp;</i>the deliberate application of ritual to democracy. A representative can take advantage of the opportunity offered to claim the nation is weak, government and society infiltrated by enemies, a good fight will drive them out and strength will return.<br />- And ritual, which for you is what the unconscious is for a psychologist - it explains everything - ritual is what was lurking in the darkness of the supposed end to history? That broke out and restarted it? That is timeless when an individual enacts the story of his own death and rebirth, but breaks out into history - warmaking, enslaving, establishing classes - when it forces another people into the role of those fighting against whom one is reborn?<br />- It's an idea, isn't it? Do you have a better one?<br />- Are you five years old?<br />- It fits the bill: a human capacity not to be found in the individual, only revealed by human beings acting in a group. And if democracy is liable to fascism, then isn't the free market economy liable also to be undermined by ritual?<br />- How?<br />- What happened with neoliberalism? Role play, spectacle, self branding, selling yourself: playing your role requires finding crowds to your show. Getting crowds into the theater audience requires selling. Selling is convincing people they lack something, that is, they are weak. The show you put on in role convinces the crowd that with taking up a role complementary to yours they will be strong. But you don't even have to take up a complementary role. You can buy a product with a crowd of people associated with it in word or image. Propaganda and advertising create the crowd needed for a role or a product's success. Like representative democracy has its fascism, free market economics has its spectacle, role play, consumerism.<br />- And the problem with property you said was behind both?<br />- Property as ritual, not in its function of making life better, is a thing or a self that has its meaning given to it in relation to the power of a crowd.<br />- And non-ritual property? If there is such a thing.<br />- After use requirements of food and shelter are satisfied, property as a gift can be an expression of individuality; the choice of who to give to can become a creative act.*** Foucault thought that the unregulated space of neoliberal market trading could be filled with spiritual revolution, sexual or religious. Instead history has showed this gap is filled in by crowds, by imagining their admiration of objects or roles played. All those ridiculous threats against my life I begin by telling you about: do you think what I do about them?<br />- What? That they arise out of the same darkness?<br />- Yes. Our senseless mass shootings at malls, schools, theaters that now are a regular fact of life: they are the acts of people desperate to remake themselves who believe themselves to be blocked from the ordinary ways of acquiring property in things or roles. They use the only tool they find at hand: violence. They've taken their cue from the wealthy: they use violence to create crowds of witnesses and gain control of their lives, like the rich use the violence (monopoly, bribery, collusion) of concentrated wealth to control markets.<br />- Ok then. History is not over, but it doesn't look good. What's to be done?<br />- If the problem is property we have to work to change our relation to property.<br />- Teach ourselves not to allow ourselves to become the property of our leaders and not become property of ourselves.<br />- Exactly. Our fascism is not like the fascism of the 20th century, arriving with all the force of government behind it. Our fascism is self-imposed. It grows out of the economic into the political rather than <i>vice versa</i>, the political imposing upon the economic, as in the old Soviet Union and Orwell's novel '1984' he based upon it.<br />- In other words it's not absolutely here yet; deadly serious in some forms, ridiculous in others.<br /><br />Further Reading:<br /><a href="http://rextyranny.blogspot.com/2013/06/there-is-no-conspiracy-because-there.html">There Is No Conspiracy Because There Are No People</a><br /><a href="http://rextyranny.blogspot.com/2012/04/eve.html">Eve In The Garden Of Eden</a><br /><a href="http://rextyranny.blogspot.com/2014/05/the-technology-of-good-and-other-stories.html">The Technology Of Good</a><br />___________________________<br /><i>* <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Fagen">Donald Fagen</a></i><br />** <i>The computer was in fact taken t</i><i>he day after this story was posted.</i><br /><i>*** See William Godwin, <a href="http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/godwin-an-enquiry-concerning-political-justice-vol-i">An Inquiry Concerning Political Justice, 1793</a></i></div>Rex Millerhttps://plus.google.com/110577386864036108962noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3300118830951645356.post-64109458167683244682017-08-31T21:51:00.004-07:002017-12-02T07:36:20.990-08:00Up in the Air&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;<a class="_hes" href="https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=https%3A%2F%2Fleesbirdblog.files.wordpress.com%2F2015%2F07%2Fapo-troc-black-chinned-hummingbird-archilochus-alexandri-c2a9wikic.jpg&amp;imgrefurl=https%3A%2F%2Fleesbird.com%2F2015%2F07%2F15%2Fwordless-birds-hummingbirds%2F&amp;docid=7EyaNPYJKy-qXM&amp;tbnid=4dmMO2B5kZydBM%3A&amp;vet=1&amp;w=1200&amp;h=800&amp;bih=468&amp;biw=853&amp;ved=0ahUKEwiR7PK7joPWAhUCqlQKHeASBk0QMwi5AihZMFk&amp;iact=c&amp;ictx=1" style="color: #660099; cursor: pointer; font-family: roboto, arial, sans-serif; font-size: small; height: auto; width: auto;"><img alt="Related image" class="target_image irc_rii" src="https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRREnWOxzpYiFXfNtSowCnHaDfOlGH02WrsZ0v5ZwmWwlHMFlMp" style="height: 80px; margin-left: -20px; margin-top: 0px; opacity: 0.8; width: 120px;" /></a><br /><br />- Sometimes our conversations soar, other times they stay down to earth.<br />- And which do you prefer?<br />- Today I'd like to soar. And since last time I took took the lead it's your turn.<br />- Not above in the air, but below in the sea, lives the octopus. Each of its 8 arms has an independent nervous system and can respond to the world around it without control from the brain. But the brain can take complete control and make the arms its instrument. Sometimes, when I sit in the botanical garden, in the late afternoon, I watch the hummingbirds feeding on the nectar in the flowers. On more than one occasion I've seen the usually solitary hummingbird dancing in a shaft of light with a butterfly almost its own size.<br />-Not chasing? Dancing?<br />-Not chasing: a constant distance is kept between the two. The acrobatics go on for up to half a minute. And do you know what do you make of this?<br />- Tell me.<br />- That I live in a world of people who are proud and playful with their independence. I take this as misdirection, octopus like sucking in my loyalty to our society valuing work and not much more. The people act like the sucker covered arms of the octopus which can act independent of the brain, having an independent nervous system, but only when the octopus brain allows, then it's all over for arm independence. Just like our people when the forces of the economy and received opinion take away &nbsp;deciding all questions of significance for them;<br />- Such as?<br />-Why they should believe work is more important than friendship, love or beauty. Why they have to sell themselves by the hour, why property is distributed unfairly, why they are told all truth is relative. Few are even aware they've been tricked by the false independence. I don't think doing things, creatively, in absolute freedom, is worth anything on its own. I'd rather have necessary physical responses to the world be taken out of my hands, be managed by other necessary physical responses, so they alone manage the job and leave me free.<br />- How?<br />- I don't think I've ever asked: do you ride a bike?<br />- As a kid. I know you ride your bike everywhere.<br />- Have you wondered how a bike keeps its balance?<br />- It has to do with the gyroscopic stabilizing effect of the turning wheels.<br />- That's part of it, together with having the turning wheel in front, slightly behind where the front fork of the frame would touch the ground if its line didn't end at the wheel axis but was extended; both factors are inessential.<br />- What is then?<br />- Weight distribution, in relation to the wheel that turns to steer. Up for the technical details?<br />- If you know them.<br />- Balance on a bike is a two step process. When the upright frame is jarred by the road or a rider's sudden movement the bike leans. When that happens, the wheel turns in the direction of the lean.<br />- Why?<br />- Imagine the axis of the wheel is the pivot point of a balance scale with two trays. A bike is designed such that when it moves, the force of weight favors the front: when the bike leans, it pushes down on the front of the leaning wheel, turning it in the direction of the lean. Can you picture this?<br />- Yes.<br />- That's the first step. The second is the same weight favoring the front of the bike now turns the wheel in the direction opposite to the lean.<br />- Why?<br />- Because though the jar causes the bike to lean and the wheel to turn, the turned wheel of the bike moving forward throws the bike into a lean in the opposition direction.<br />- The bike moving forward and jarred, leans and causes the pivoting wheel to turn, but the turned wheel, in the continuing forward motion, and I take it the ceasing of the jar, corrects the lean and re-balances the bike.<br />- Yes. It's an automatic process that requires nothing of the rider, who glides down the road with mind free. It's a sort of horizontal hovering, if you think about the hummingbird's vertical hovering, which is achieved by a similar two step correcting process, or homeostasis. Its wings, beating at a rate between 50 and 200 times a second, move in a figure-eight pattern, with the first downward movement creating positive lift, and as the wing flips over to beat down with its other side, a negative lift. The two beats together effect a constant adjustment of vertical position. Do you see where I'm going with this?<br />- Not yet.<br />- One day, not long ago, I was riding fast on my bike by Holmby park. A hummingbird veered ahead of me and into my path, and keeping a distance in front about 20 feet tracked me the entire length of the park. It flew with me like I'd seen it do with butterflies. I wondered if the hummingbird recognized in the movement of my bike a similarity to its own. Beautiful, right?<br />- Beautiful.<br />- That's the soaring part of the story. We descend now back down below the sea to the octopus. I'm sure you feel the same way I do. We want to escape mere response to the world. We want to dance in the sunlit air with butterflies, not hide in the dark of the sea. We're pushed to be proud of being able to do our work freely, manipulating the things of the world, but all important choices and experiences in life are left...<br />- Up in the air.Rex Millerhttps://plus.google.com/110577386864036108962noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3300118830951645356.post-12030655814953350072017-08-26T23:25:00.001-07:002017-08-29T03:46:58.596-07:00Heaven On Many Sides<a href="https://www.google.com/search?sa=G&amp;hl=en&amp;q=united+states+citizen+opinion+%5Bbook%5D&amp;tbm=isch&amp;tbs=simg:CAQSlwEJrqxeXPP1OwkaiwELEKjU2AQaBAgACAgMCxCwjKcIGmIKYAgDEijcHLYftx_1IHN4cqQyWG40bkxvPHOM8wznxLvs67S3EOeI8wTnxOfw6GjCeLxvldLMGXKONGxRWfhcbH3CR04SkStPPvnK9Koie7wCvx7LOPpP9XqzL61QDMQ0gBAwLEI6u_1ggaCgoICAESBKGGA7gM&amp;ved=0ahUKEwjUsLL94vbVAhXJrlQKHUa3DKcQwg4IJCgA" style="background-color: white; color: #660099; cursor: pointer; font-family: Roboto, arial, sans-serif; text-decoration-line: none;"><img alt="" class="_u6" src="https://encrypted-tbn2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSU9V5ZAOr3gpnGK-kqBlkefqPK-BWgkoHyXIsASgwKxn4oddV5aaR_Q60" style="border: 1px solid rgb(0, 0, 255); display: block; padding: 1px;" /></a><br />- I'd like to take the lead in this discussion too.<br />- Fine with me.<br />- You are fond of saying you're just a talker, not an expert in anything. So I've gone to a couple of experts.<br />- Experts on what?<br />- Did you know the comedian Steven Colbert studied philosophy before he went into show business?<br />- I didn't. Did he go into philosophy because it was funny, or did he leave philosophy because it wasn't funny enough?<br />- I don't know. Maybe he was attracted to it because it was funny, but left it behind because it was not funny in its consequences.&nbsp;Perhaps that is your view too?<br />- It's been funny enough for me, despite most being boring, or near unreadable, or flat-out wrong. What's your funny subject?<br />- Religion and our president.<br />- Oh. That funny story. And Colbert, in your expert-advised view, might not fail to see the humor there if he bothered to return to philosophy and look.<br />- If he didn't, a good guess would be it was because he, a practicing Catholic, didn't get the Jewish connection. In polytheism - religions telling stories of many gods - rituals allow participants to act out the passage from weakness to strength of a varying set of human attributes, to think, to love, to use tools, to fight, each represented by a separate god. In monotheism, instead of many different rituals there is only one, a single enactment in history moving from weakness to strength, from wrong to right. We tell ourselves the story of how we have embarked on the journey of single ritual. Three positions are staked out. They are: 1. We have the rules of what we should do, but were not there yet. 2. We are just about to be there, a savior will arrive to announce our arrival, our task is to see this world of strength and beauty and love, what we do to get there is of no importance. 3. We can imagine ourselves already there, that it has all been written already, so we must submit to the script; both the rules how we are to act, and thoughts of the world we are to arrive at are set already.<br />- First Judaism's rules of action, prohibition against images and determining how the world looks when the time for action is over. Then Christianity reverses this valuing, attention is turned towards the heaven of love we will be taken to by the messiah. And Islam, the Jewish and Christian together: you have no choice but submit to the rules and think as others do. The story of the ritual of history is already written right up to paradise at the end. What is supposed to be so funny about this story?<br />- Ritual, single history or otherwise, makes use of forgetting our personal weakness, letting the sense of power acting in concert with a group replace it with a feeling of rebirth. The single ritual of monotheism, however, makes rebirth, recovery of power, for the Jews something absolutely not the be relied upon, for the Christians dependent on the grace of being able to leave the world of bodily things behind and enter the world of pure thought, and for Muslims demanding absolute submission to rules and authority. The single ritual is undermined by not being acted out in the real world, by jumping directly to the conclusion, or by being seen as finished before offering even get a chance to start.<br />- Then what was the advantage if any of monotheism?<br />- As if you didn't know. I got this all from you. The Jews, prohibited from expecting or picturing particular results of their action, could modify how they interpreted the world so as to learn from experience in following the rules in different ways. Monotheism, with the Jews, allows the forgetting of ritual to be transformed into something completely different, the gathering of knowledge.<br />- And that is funny?<br />- No, not yet. The punch line comes with the next step, when thinking of the heavenly world of love and beauty that we are destined to, that we know we were made to arrive at, results in a terrible new forgetting.<br />- Forgetting what?<br />- The body. With Christianity the body became the enemy, its alien demands interfering with thoughts of love and beauty of the heaven to be brought by the messiah. The actions that lead to heaven are not the subject of knowledge, as with the Jews. Knowledge for the Christians is only about heaven itself, attained by grace, not knowledge of the world. This leaves the Christian vulnerable to ignorance of what makes for good and bad action, and inexperienced in control of bad action. Self observation and self control are not valued. The same is even more true in Islam where the rules are unalterable and actions determined in advance.<br />- The monotheistic ritual can only be the carrier of learning at the first step with the Jews. How is that funny?<br />- The subsequent monotheisms, &nbsp;confused and weakened by their own inexplicable violence arising out of the thought to be separate world of the body, recover their confidence by return to the original, episodic ritual. In repeatedly attacking the practitioners of the first monotheism, the Jews, seen as an enemy within. they feel themselves to be getting back on course.<br />- And this is funny? Ritual that had miraculously been transformed into a tool of learning devolved back to a primitive instrument of power?<br />- Wait, the story doesn't stop there. I'll bring in now the authorities. As I said, the problem with having for your goal contemplation of a perfected world is that the body becomes separate from thought, seemingly inessential or even the enemy to thought. That according to Spinoza.<br />- Jewish Spinoza. 17th Century Dutch philosopher.<br />- Yes. According to Spinoza the separation of world and thought is completely wrong. Mind and body are two ways of looking at the same thing. Affected each in our own individual circumstances, our body among the things of the world, we respond, either actively or passively. Actively, when we act from knowledge of what we've done in the past and its consequences; passively, when we act from fear and anger. Our body and where it is placed is what allows us to learn. There can be no mind, in an active sense, in the sense that involves knowledge, separate from body. Nothing happens in heaven. Fear and anger, arising from loss of security, are habitual, bodily responses, unconsciously chosen flight or attack. This bodily passive activity, unrelated to knowledge, intrudes on the heavenly serenity of the Christian mind.<br />- And the security whose loss the isolated Christian mind suffers from and responds to could be that produced by primitive, polytheistic ritual. Ritual not of knowledge, but passionate acts of forgetting, violent attacks on the enemy within, ending in a feeling of recovered power.<br />- You refer to the rituals of anti-Semitism continuous in Christianity. And how is that funny?<br />- It's not. Of course it's not, but we're getting there. Around the time the Jews were first interpreting their laws, learning about themselves and the world, their ideas never separate from the world, the citizens of ancient Athens were practicing democracy, making democracy possible, qualifying themselves to share power with each other by continually observing themselves and controlling themselves. A couple thousand years later democracy begins to make a return in a big way in Europe with the arrival of the nation state. But since Europe was Christian, this created instability. Were faithful citizens to care about their actions or only thoughts? Europe muddles on. And then what happens?<br />- The funny part?<br />- Yes. Philosophers start paying attention to the problem. 19th Century German philosopher Nietzsche came up with the solution. Get rid of Christianity! Christianity was a Jewish plot to devitalize their enslavers, and it worked. And once we free ourselves from the Jewish plot, we can do, what?<br />- Learn about life through self knowledge and self discipline?<br />- Hardly. We former Christians can now individually construct our own rituals, celebrating our power and will. To institute ritual is a creative act that can be learned and perfected.<br />- So in rituals based on fear and anger learning is brought back in. That an irony, but is it funny?<br />- The funny part is how all these ideas go to explaining the behavior of one of the lowest, crudest men who ever lived, our new president.<br />- I'm beginning to smile.<br />- I can see. Let go at this step by step. In his campaign, our soon to be elected president assigns his enemies to the land of the Jews: they have too many rules, they have this abysmal rule obsessed political correctness, they don't care about our country, they don't want to make it great! The original monotheism ritual of rules to action giving way to monotheism of thought, in this case, Our Great Country. The Christian monotheism wages primitive ritual battle against the Jewish politically correct and their rules. Rules don't matter, the force of our united spirit will prevail, and Heavens! Our beautiful country will be ours again. Pure fascism: Identification of enemy within; violence that is pure, uncorrupted by rule-burdened civilization, and return of lost power. Before our new president became a politician and a fascist, he was a big practitioner of Nietzschian&nbsp;rituals of will. These he calls battles between winners and losers, and in his thoughts is always a winner, using astonishing quantities of lies, deceptions, betrayals in his personal and business lives. Now look at how our president spoke about the violence and murder committed by marching neo-Nazis at Charlottesville last week. He observed: 'There was violence on many sides, on many sides', the phrase 'on many sides' repeated with a kind of sermonizing sigh. Our president was, I think, saying to us, ha ha, you've got your politically correct, each group with its own rituals, repeated ways of doing things that makes participants feel secure, each isolated by their habits to be protected by other politically correct ritualists. So ha ha, you see what I have lowered myself to do to you? My guys the neo-Nazis are a protected group too, no? Yes. 'You know it too,' our President told the assembled press, feeling sure he'd caught them in a logical trap.<br />- And the funny part?<br />- That among the Neo-Nazis demonstrating were a couple of college students who quickly were identified by the classmates from news video and were receiving death threats. They complained to reporters that they were protecting their traditions, and they could not be placed in any category such as white supremacist.<br />- What they did at the demonstration was an act of will, its purpose to reestablish power among people like themselves exercising will; they were unwilling that what they were doing, what their passive, passion intoxicated bodies were doing, be made a matter of defined social roles. The heaven they seek was not to be created out of something so meaningless, so uninspiring as a category of people defined not by beliefs but by their action, not even the inspiring categories of White Supremacist or neo-Nazi.<br />- That's funny. A little.<br />- Culture as a function of will, thought uprooted from the actions taken by individual bodies, carries no knowledge of good and bad and so inevitably falls into the bad of primitive ritual, of violence to establish or reestablish order.<br />- Ok. I get it. It's not just rhetoric: political correctness is no stranger to fascism. Fascism easily claims from political correctness its own protected status as one aggrieved traditional group among equals. Whether 'just obeying orders', or 'just giving orders', they are engaged in the protected traditional behavior of political correctness, no matter that the world of rules whose protection they demand is the Jewish world of rules they at other times charge with being their fundamental enemy. &nbsp;They are above the petty concerns of consistency or rationality. Funny. Ha ha.<br />- A modern scholar of Judaism I consulted, Dobbs-Weinstein,* explains that separation of religion from the state has been since the time of humanism seen as a necessary protection against battles between religions becoming political battles. However, the religious battle has come in through the back door with the politically correct relativist's individualist will to power in his own voluntarily instituted or participated in group. Each group demands protection from the others,&nbsp;while offering no cooperation. Indeed, groups have no means to cooperate without practice observing themselves and controlling themselves, the qualities held in common democracies demand. Dobbs- Weinstein traces as you have the Jewish focus on action rather than thought through Aristotle in ancient Greece to Averroes in the Muslim world of the late Middle Ages, philosophers commonly misunderstood in their Christianized interpretations.<br />- Not to mention their ancestor, the deChristianized Plato, and his ancestor, the deChristianized Parmenides.<br />- Well, yes. Anyway. Freud and Marxist in our modern world recover more directly the emphasis on action, and so doing uncover the relation between good and bad action absent in the focus on heavens.<br />- The funny part about that is that by their using language of the world of heaven, the materialist language of science, of a separate, self contained world of things, they undermine the project of recovery of ethics. Freud had parts of self in a materialist dynamic of forces, Marx had his economic material of surplus value of things shifted about by the power of labor.<br />- They self-Christianized. What should they have done?<br />- Simply ask of themselves, Were they doing justice to themselves and others? instead of looking for a heaven of things in which that justice would be expressed outside individual bodily lives of action.<br />- Another modern expert I consulted, the&nbsp;Spinozan and historian of the enlightenment Jonathan Israel, argues that as long as thought was separated from the body there was an implication that since god made the world so it had to be good. When Spinoza returned thought to the body, identifying one with the other, god could be thought as being in the world (there was no where else for him to be), and since he was, an attractive force or encouragement towards perfection, there was no reason thought could not improve the relation of body in the world, that is, historical progress appears more possible. In fact, Israel claims that the French revolution was only possible because of the widespread reading and influence of Spinoza.<br />- If that is right, then political progress has involved a religious-political regression from polytheism, to monotheism, to Christianity and Islam then back to the beginnings of monotheism, then back to the absolute beginning in polytheism of the individual ethics-free willful ritualist&nbsp;losers and winners. It took a while for us to get here, and I'm with you, I see humor here, a little bit. The story of the Jews goes a little further, with the founding of the state of Israel. Jews are accused of considering the founding of the Jewish state, an immense technological and social achievement, a use of rules of action in the world to obtainknowledge of the world if there ever was one, to be intended as a heaven, though that would be a Christian heaven; they are accused of making for themselves a military state, though that would be an Islamic sort of closed totalitarianism; they are accused of applying fascist, that is, anti-Semitic means to protect against outsiders a society of amoral individualists. The Jews are accused of recapitulating the entire history of latter day monotheistic and finally polytheistic corruption of the Jewish focus on rules experimentally applied to action.<br />- Needless to say, all wildly disputable.<br />- But a little funny?<br /><br />Further Reading:<br /><a href="http://rextyranny.blogspot.com/2009/12/republic.html">How To Read Plato's 'Republic'</a><br /><a href="http://rextyranny.blogspot.com/2015/10/homework-serial-killers.html">Homework For Serial Killers</a><br /><a href="http://rextyranny.blogspot.com/2015/10/surviving-on-miracles.html">Hungry Dog &amp; The 17 Year Man</a><br /><a href="http://rextyranny.blogspot.com/2015/09/bringing-back-stray-sheep.html">Bringing Back Stray Sheep</a><br /><a href="http://rextyranny.blogspot.com/2014/11/a-machine-to-make-people-unhappy.html">A Machine For Making People Unhappy</a><br />__________________________<i><br />* 'Spinoza’s Critique of Religion and Its Heirs: Marx, Benjamin, Adorno', Idit Dobbs-Weinstein</i>,<i>&nbsp;2015</i>Rex Millerhttps://plus.google.com/110577386864036108962noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3300118830951645356.post-8576690615594123842017-08-21T11:47:00.002-07:002017-11-16T09:18:11.333-08:00Believe It Or Not<a class="_hes" href="https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.jamunatv.net%2Fuploads%2Fnews%2Fimages%2F4%2Fc8771cd25d6de474abf9416a924f73291.jpg&amp;imgrefurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.jamunatv.net%2Fnews_details%2F2010&amp;docid=LPpnQdKZkw8LLM&amp;tbnid=2kDv4qb2yXlbLM%3A&amp;vet=1&amp;w=300&amp;h=300&amp;bih=468&amp;biw=853&amp;ved=0ahUKEwj3vPrC--jVAhWoxlQKHdfLA5cQxiAIHSgF&amp;iact=c&amp;ictx=1" style="background-color: #222222; color: #660099; cursor: pointer; font-family: Roboto, arial, sans-serif; font-size: small; height: auto; width: auto;"><img alt="Related image" class="irc_rii" src="https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQjMTX1L22PK56dUQ8NNI344dBdr50-X97dPZ_yWTELVIMpOz6D" style="margin-top: 0px; width: 80px;" /></a><br /><br />- Listen, I've been trying to work something out. Tell me what you think.<br />- About?<br />- Politics. Political belief. I think it is not really belief. That it is not like what we mean when we say we believe the sun will come up tomorrow in the east.<br />- Not a prediction.<br />- Prediction, but of a kind that involves elements of passivity and superstition. I'll explain. People believe passively when they have been told 'this is how it is', and rewarded for agreeing and punished for disagreeing.<br />- Their belief is emotional, the product of indoctrination.<br />- Yes. When belief is active, it is either understanding or superstition. Understanding, 'standing under', is when we come to a conclusion based on past experience.<br />- The past 'stands under', is the support of how we see the present.<br />- Yes.<br />- And superstition?<br />- When how we see the world is not based on experience but is an imagined future 'standing over' our present, an expectation of the future that we in our present give ourselves.<br />- 'Reduce taxes for the rich and we will all gain'. A statement of the future we believe because we've been told, not because we or anyone else has ever had any experience, evidence of its truth.<br />- Yes. But there is also an active version of superstition in which people actively choose to hold superstitions because of political benefit from doing so.<br />- They're rich so their taxes are reduced.<br />- Exactly.<br />- Now this is what I want your opinion on: is it possible active superstition is more than political expediency of selling the idea to others?<br />- Do I think our politicians really believe?<br />- Yes.<br />- You're asking about our politicians being superstitious in a society generally considered scientific, based on understanding. They seem to be deliberately turning their backs on evidence that would produce understanding. And if aware they are deliberately turning their backs on the job of gathering evidence, they can't be said to be interested in discovering the truth of what they believe.<br />- Yes.<br />- But in terms of real experience, they have understanding that holding their beliefs is factually good for them. A political understanding accompanies the superstitious belief.<br />- Yes.<br />- So that is what, and how they believe: they understand it is good for them to tell others and themselves that reducing taxes for the rich is good for everyone, but the idea itself to them is a superstition, held because it is useful. In time, however, in company with their fellow politicians believing and understanding the same thing, passive belief arises based on social reward and punishment.<br />- And then they have both passive belief and true understanding. They believe what their group believes and understand it is good for them to do so. They forget their superstitious belief once was active.<br />- Yes.<br />- And this belief of yours: is it superstition or understanding?<br />- A little of both. A superstition, when we've decided on testing it, is what we call an hypothesis.<br />- The hypothesis is: Despite being educated in a technological and scientific society, politicians deliberately maintain a superstitious relation to the world, turning their backs on experience, doing this with an understanding that among the group of their fellow politicians it is good for them to do so. In time their active decision to hold superstitious beliefs is replaced by the passive rewards of going along with the group of other politicians.<br /><br />Further Reading:<br /><a href="http://rextyranny.blogspot.com/2017/08/business-is-business.html">Business Is Business</a>Rex Millerhttps://plus.google.com/110577386864036108962noreply@blogger.com